CyberDrive 16 x 12 x 40 CDR/W

Author : Martyn Date : 11th October 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank Cyberdrive and especially Bianca Giesers for their help and courtesy in providing this CD drive for review.

 

Part Five: Testing

All those features and extras would mean nothing if the drive was a poor performer. Lets run the Cyberdrive CDR/W through some tests to try to evaluate it's true worth.

(The Test Setup)

AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Gigabyte GA-ZDX
256MB Micron Cas 2 PC2100
ATI 64MB Radeon Vivo - Retail
The drive itself (Cyberdrive CW038D)

To start the testing I used Nero's own version of CDspeed 2000. (Result thumbs' are clickable as usual.)

(Transfer Rate Test)

Using a 500 megabyte CD containing text files and .mp3 files I tested quite how adventurous the 40x rate claim was.

The drive surprised me by performing well and reaching almost 39x in this test. This is somewhat unusual and speeds are generally overstated a tad more, one thing was for sure, it was nice to see it reach its claimed speed.

 

(CPU Utilization Test)

One of the most important tests in my opinion. Could the drive keep CPU use to a minimum?

A great showing in this test; CPU usage was kept to a minimum reaching only nine percent at 8x recording.

Part Six: 'One Backup CD please!'

You will be pleased to know that this drive fully supports RAW reading and writing. I understand why the restrictions are in place but nothing displeases more more than bringing my shiny new game home and attempting to back it up and getting nothing but a useless CD for my trouble. If I bought the game with my money I'm damn sure I should have the right to protect my investment. They will try to tell you about the dangerous of piracy and so on and so forth yet everyone seems to miss the other factor lying just below surface; if I send a scratched CD back to the company for replacement, it would cost me around 50% of the cost of the game to receive a replacement! Someone is making even more money here and you don't need to be a genius to work out whom!
Sorry to digress so but this subject is one that really disgusts me sometimes. So......yes, the drive does support RAW writing for those all important backups. Nero can usury handle most CD's but for the more heavily protected types you will need to experiment with a RAW program such as Clone CD.

I even tried to ruin a blank CD while testing the 'ExacLink' features of the drive. This is the name Cyberdrive have given to their burnproof type technology. Despite my best efforts while burning a 430MB CD filled with mp3 files, I couldn't get the CD to stop. The times the 'ExacLink' took over were sometimes apparent as the buffer jumped up and down furiously but after a few seconds the CD creation process continued as normal. Suffice to say that not much short of resetting the machine can ruin your CD. An excellent feature to have at your disposal.

At this point I must say this drive is an absolute pleasure to use. I have made over ten CD's with it now and had no problems at all. I backed up a five hundred megabyte CD containing various files and the whole process took less than four and a half minutes. By using the drive as the reader and the writer I thought problems could occur, but I'm happy to say none have surfaced yet.

Lets see how the drive will score...........

 

Page Four: Final Thoughts
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