CR52-M: CDRW ramps up to 32X

Testing the drive

We used the following configuration to test our CR52-M:

Gigabyte GA-7VRX
AMD Athlon MP 2100+
2 x 128 DDR Corsair XMS 2400
Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache
Windows XP SP1

Using Ahead’s CD Speed 1.02e, we run a battery of read, write and rewrite tests on the drive. Our first test determines CD read speed in normal mode, while the second determines the speed while the turbo 52X mode is enabled. The following read speeds are for a pressed HP System Recovery CD.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

As you can see, access times are right on the MSI specification of 90ms. Both modes use CAV mode while reading, which produces fairly good average burn speeds. You may recall CAV stands for constant angular velocity; so, the drive spins at a constant rate while the header moves towards the outside of the CD. Since the linear velocity of the position on the CD increases when the header moves outwards, the data transfer rate eventually obtains the 52X read speed.

We also tested the CR52-M on a variety of CDR, CDRW and DAE media. The following table contains our results.

	Average Transfer	Seek Random	Seek 1/3	Seek Full	Media Length
Pressed HP System Recovery (Turbo)	35.80X	83ms	90ms	166ms	69:18.41
Pressed HP System Recovery (Normal)	28.52X	93ms	87ms	155ms	69:18.41
Pressed DAE Global Underground 24 CD2 (Turbo)	38.41X	N/A	N/A	N/A	73:20.15
Pressed DAE Global Underground 24 CD2 (Normal)	29.29X	N/A	N/A	N/A	73:20.15
Burned PNY 48X CDR Dummy File (Turbo)	38.95X	85ms	91ms	164ms	74:00.05
Burned PNY 48X CDR Dummy File (Normal)	29.40X	95ms	91ms	153ms	74:00.05
Burned Mitsubishi 32X CDRW Dummy File (Turbo)	30.64X	84ms	94ms	155ms	74:00.05
Burned Mitsubishi 32X CDRW Dummy File (Normal)	30.62X	85ms	94ms	154ms	74:00.05

The MSI CR52-M performed on par consistently. The drive is slightly slower than its Lite-On and ASUS counterparts. Fortunately, seek times are quite low and we had no problems while testing the read portion of the drive.