In order to test and confirm the CD reading specifications for all drive, we used one CD pressed media, a copy on CD-R and HS-RW media. The results are given in the following graphs.

- CD Format

With Pressed CD reading, the Plextor PX-130A was the fastest of the three drives, with the LiteOn close behind. The Asus was\slower due to its max supported reading speed of 42X with the specific media.

Once again, good performance with CDR media. The reviewed drive was only marginally slower that the LiteOn.

Last test with CD media and specifically, USRW media. The drive was the slowest of the three with this type of media, although speed differences are considered negligible.

- DVD Format

We tested the performance of the Plextor PX-130A DVD-ROM drive with a variety of DVD-ROM media.

The PX-130A confirmed the manufacturer's specifications reaching 16X maximum speed with an average of 12.13X. All three drives hade very similar times.

The following DVD is a PTP DVD-ROM where the two layers of the disc are read sequentially, with the drive starting reading from the inner part of the disc, which is the beginning of each layer, progressing towards the outer range for each layer.

The Plextor drive was the fastest and with a difference, reading the PTP DL media.

The graph shown below, shows the reading performance of the three drives with OTP dual layer media. The first layer of an OTP dual layer DVD-ROM is read exactly the same way as the first layer of the PTP disc we tested previously. The difference here is the reading strategy of the second layer on the disc. The beginning of the second layer is located in the outer part of the disc, so the drive starts reading from the outer tracks towards the inner part of the disc.

Once again, the PX-130A proved to be the faster reader, this time with DVD-ROM DL media.

Here we will be testing the performance of the PX-130A with recordable and re-writable media. We measured reading times for each type of media with the Nero CD-Speed Utility.

The reviewed drive performed well with write once and re-writable media, although speeds with the ASUS drive were the fastest.

We ripped the contents of a pressed Double Layer movie to the hard disk using all three drives. The results are summarized below:

At 11259 Kb/s average, the PX-130 performed admirably in this test, coming slightly behind the ASUS drive. We expected a higher ripping speed, simply due to the tradition of Plextor drives as being the top (fastest) rippers.

-Appendix Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

• CD Pressed / CD-R / US-RW
• DVD Pressed SL / DVD Pressed DL / DVD Pressed DL OTP / DVD-R / DVD-RW / DVD+R / DVD+RW

You might notice in the above graphs that the tests were done with the 1.01 firmware revision. We repeated the tests with the 1.02 but we didn't noticed any difference in speed.