If youre after the fastest writing times then the BenQ 40x12x48 speed CD-RW drive will see you right. Dont expect a CD drive to get much faster than this. Though 40x speed writable drives are upon us, physically spinning a CD at these speeds is a difficult job for a drive to perform, so you tend to find many of the possible performance increases do start to diminish. This particular drive supports one of the highest read speeds for a CD-RW drive hitting 48x. It can also take full advantage of high speed writable media thanks to it 40x writing speed and 12x rewrite speed.
In use, the drive performed well burning an entire CD-R in just three minutes 36 seconds, while thanks to the improved 12x rewrite speed it managed to write an entire CD-RW in six minutes 46 seconds. The write time isnt much faster than most 32x drives, but the CD-RW time does outperform slower 10x drives by at least a minute and a half if not more.
Raw performance of the drive was above average. The drive managed a maximum read speed of 6.2 MB/sec, with an average read speed equivalent to a 28x drive. For a drive this fast the processor usage was good at 32 per cent, while is had an excellent seek time of just 71 ms.
Supplied along with the CD drive you get a simple installation guide, mounting screws and pass-through audio cable. No IDE cable is supplied so youll need to make sure you have a spare IDE connection in your PC. The drive also comes with the latest version of Nero Burning ROM 5.5, one of the more accomplished CD authoring packages. To help you get started straight away theres a piece of CD-R and CD-RW media.
With a 2 MB buffer and Seamless Link to protect from write problems, the BenQ drive offers good CD-R, very fast CD-RW speeds, fast read speeds, excellent seek times and quiet operation all meaning thisd make a solid workhorse writer. --Nick Baxter
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