Testing
So how do you go about testing an optical drive? Well obviously since this is a Blu-ray drive we will be watching a movie on it, but what else can we do to test the speeds? This is really ones of our first internal optical drive reviews so I had to do some research. I decided to use Opti Drive Control to test the speeds of the drive. This program will run a test that will give you the read speed, access time, burst rate, and CPU usage much like HD Tunes does for hard drives.
Our test system is comprised of an Intel Core i5-750 processor, Gigabyte P55A-UD4P motherboard, 4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 memory, Power Color ATI 5870 1GB video card, Corsair TX650 power supply and a 1TB SATA drive.
Our first test will be a Blu-ray movie disc The Matrix. This is a dual-layer 37.11GB commercially pressed disc.
As you can see from the test the drive peaked right under the 4X advertised speed mark. The disc had an average read speed of 2.83x, started out at 1.73x and ended a 1.90x. The random access time was 290ms and the 1/3 stroke was 260ms, CPU usage was at 0%.
Our next test is a DVD-ROM game disc Crysis Warhead. It is a 7.16 commercially pressed disc.
The tests results has the drive peaking right at the 6X advertised speed mark. The disc had an average read speed of 4.32x, it started out at 2.58x and ended at 2.62x. The random access time was 132ms and the 1/3 stroke was 172ms, CPU usage was also at 0%.
This drive is a DVD burner as well so why not test the burning speed of the drive. We used a Verbatim 4.7GB DVD+R 16x disc.
The entire burn process took only 5 minutes 10 seconds. The average write speed was 11.39x and started out at 6.71x and finished at 16.06x. During the test the drive’s RPM’s stayed pretty much the same the entire way through the burn.
