Media Tests - Page 1

You might have thought by now that the Sanyo CRD-BP1500P is the fastest CD-RW drive ever made… And you are partially correct. Why partially? Cause the media quality is a very important aspect in such high speed writing speeds.

For our tests we used both 74 & 80min various brands CDs. We just got in our hands 24x certified media from Taiyo Yuden and Mitsui and Ricoh. We supposed to had Verbatim's 24x certified media also but till the time that article was written nothing came over.

Our goal was to test both how the 3 drives perform under good/medium and bad quality media at the maximum speed they can write. We made 3 burn attempts for each drive and each brand.

All CDs burned under the same capacity (74:03:65) with Nero 5.5.1.8. Especially for the Yamaha 2200E and Ricoh MP7200A we done 4 burns each round. For the Ricoh 7200 setting JustSpeed on/off and for the Yamaha 2200E OWC on/off ("OWC" means "Optimum Writing Control"). So for just testing only one brand we used 15CDs for all 3 drives. The amount of CDs for 74mins reached 180CDs and for 80min at 105. That makes around 285CDs! Not bad :-)

74min CDs Test Results:

- No Name (Prodisc) X? - silver top

- Creation 12x

- Ricoh 8x

- MMore ?x

- Princo Silver top ?x

- Verbatim 16x

- Mitsui SG Ultra 16x

- TDK D-View 12x

- Maxell ?x (printable top)

- Verbatim 16x+ (Generic)

- Taiyo Yuden 24x (silver top)

- Mitsui SG Ultra II 24x

- Ricoh 20x

Conclusion:

As the tests results showed, all drives seem to have various problems with each media. For example even with Taiyo's Yuden 24x certified media, all 3 drives gave back the not the best results as you may expected. This is that we will occupy the engineers for the next couple of months. How improve media compatibility in such high speeds...

Now if you wondered which media worked better for each drive we can say that:

- Yamaha 2200E: Verbatim 16x+ (Generic). The drive gave back the exact same time results with both "OWC" enabled/disabled. The media supposed to be 24x certified ,hence the 16x+ mark, and performed very good also with the rest drives.

- Ricoh 7200A: Ricoh 20x. As you might expected the Ricoh performed best with Ricoh 20x certified media in both cases, when "JustSpeed" was enabled/disabled.

- Sanyo BP1500P: Mitsui SG Ultra II (24x)/Verbatim 16x. With both media, the Sanyo drive gave back the best results. The best time result was 3:59mins and it's the faster among the 3 tested drives..