YAMAHA CRW-F1 IDE CDR-W - Page 9

RW Writing Tests

The YAMAHA CRWF1 is the first ever recorder that supports 24X (P-CAV) recording speed with of course new Ultra HS-RW media. The new re-writing speeds are comply with Orange Book Volume III Part 2. In the near future its expected that re-writing speeds will further increased up to 32X (CAV).

We used Nero 5.5.9.2 for writing CDs at the maximum RW speed for all the tested drives. YAMAHA send us two pieces of 24X HS-RW media (made from Mitsubishi Chemicals) that used for the re-writing tests.

Nero reports that the drive can write at 10X, 16X and 24X with Ultra HS-RW. With 4X-10X HS-RW media, the supported rewriting speeds are 4X, 8X, 10X and 12X (CLV). The negative point here, is that the current firmware (v1.0b) the drive supports 12X re-writing with selected HS-RW media - Plextor's bulked 4-10X, made by Digital Storage (97m27s00f ID code).

We tried several 16X HS-RW media from:

• ASUS 80min 16X (ACER 97m22s6f)
• CyberDrive 80min 16X (Plasmon 97m27s11f)
• Daxon 16X (ACER 97m22s62f)

, and the CRWF1 drive supported only 4X and 10X re-writing speeds. The above media can be re-written from the ASUS CRW4816A and CyberDrive CW078D at 16X without any issues.

YAMAHA replied that "...We have tested the above 16X High Speed CD-RW media, but unfortunately we have found that its quality does not meet with our standard when we rewrite data on the media at 16x. We continue to evaluate several new High Speed CD-RW media. We will release new firmware to accept rewriting at 16x or 12x when we find the HS-RW media to be rewritten at such speed...» That means future firmware upgrades will support more media for the 12X with normal HS-RW and maybe even 16X with normal HS-RW media.

Below, we can see the writing graph with a Ultra HS-RW media. The YAMAHA CRWF1 drive starts writing at 19.71X and reaches 24.06X at 10mins. The average theoretical re-writing speed is 23.75X, making it almost equal to a 24X CLV drive.

With the use of Ultra HS-RW, YAMAHA CRW-F1 finished the task in 221 seconds, breaking any previous record. The ASUS CRW4816A and CyberDrive CW078D gave approximately the same results at 16X, and LiteOn and Plextor drives share the last position at 12X.

At 16X (Ultra HS-RW), the ASUS CRW4812A is faster by 6-7 seconds from YAMAHA CRW-F1 and CyberDrive CW078D.

- Packet Writing Tests

We used Ahead InCD v3.32 for the packet writing tests with the 24X Ultra HS-RW media.

The formatted disc had 534 MB of free space. We copied a 403 MB file (403.147 kbs) from a Hard Disk (on the same PC as the writers) to the formatted RW media using Windows Explorer (we dragged and dropped) and we completed the test twice to eliminate any possible time measurement faults and user errors:

The performance of the CRW-F1 under packet writing mode with 24X Ultra HS-RW media is impressive. The drive reaches 17.35X when writing and 12.94X while reading. Other drives that support 16X re-writing are much slower with 11.28X and 11.45X from ASUS and CyberDrive respectively.

With normal 4-10X HS-RW media, the drive reached 8.45X at the writing part and 12.94X at the reading part.