Ricoh MP7120A IDE CDR-W - Page 2

Data Tests (Pressed CDs)

Test Method
- SCSI Mechanic v2.1h: This was used to compare the Ricoh's I/O performance against other various CDR-W drives (see charts). We used a pressed CD containing PlexTools v1.05 for all of the tests. Explanation of the tests are listed below:

- Random I/O: Random sector numbers are generated, and then that sector is read. This measures average access time.
- Sequential I/O: The initial sector number is set to 0. The sector is read and the sector number is incremented. Most drives do well with this, as each track is read and then cached.
- Same Sector I/O: The same sector is read repeatedly. If the drives cache works correctly, this should show the max transfer speed for the device, since after the first read, the sector is always in cache.

- CD Speed 99 v0.70 was also used to check the drive performance with pressed CDs. For that test we used PlexTools v1.05 original CD.

- SCSI Mechanic v2.1h results:

Asyou can see from the graph above, the Ricoh drive performed well in the Random and Sequential I/O tests. It produced the best Random I/O (689kb/s) and second best Sequential I/O (3620 kb/s) results. The PleXWriter PX-W1210A produced the best Sequential (3705kb/s) and Same Sector (10217knb/s) I/O test results. The Sanyo CRD-BP3 came off worst in the Random (562kb/s) and Sequential (3590kb/s) I/O test results. You are probably wondering why the PleXWriter PX-W1210A has superior performance in the Same Sector I/O test. The explanation is more than likely because Plextor drives have better software and cache management. The Ricoh MP7120A is able to achieve an average reading transfer rate of 3.59mb/s. It cannot compete with the PleXWriter PX-W1210A, which has the best read performance of any CDR-W drive we have tested!

- CD Speed 99 v0.70 results:

Using CD Speed 0.7, we can see what our previous results confirmed: The PX-W1210A holds first place, the MP7120A second and the Sanyo BP3 comes in last.

For Seek time results, the Ricoh MP7120A really beats the competition. It is 58% faster than the PX-W1210A and 35% faster than the BP3. This is very good performance, and will be useful when you have CDs that have many small files.

Verdict of data (pressedCDs) tests:
The Ricoh MP7120A is a good performer for a CDR-W drive. It doesn't have the best performance in terms of Sequential reading, when compared to the Plextor, but has very impressive seek times. Its average reading speed using PlexTools v1.05 was 24.45x compared to the PX-W1210A, which had 24.98x, and the CRD-BP3, which had 23.33x. It's seek times, as we said earlier, are currently the best you can get from a CDR-W drive.

In the SCSI Mechanic tests, the Ricoh MP7120A took second place behind the PX-W1210A. The drive delivered an average sequential reading result of 3.59mb/s compared to the PX-W1210A that gave 3.70mb/s. Both the Sanyo and Ricoh do not seem to be able to handle cache management as well as the Plextor. Their performance therefore appears to be much lower. Overall, we feel that Ricoh should consider a little fine-tuning. This is definitely required when directly comparing read performance with the Plextor PX-W1210A.