| |
The ability for limiting the reading speed of a CD-ROM drive is a must have feature for high speed drives.
Although a high speed drive allows you to transfer data in less time, there are some disadvantages of using such a drive:
- Noise: A drive faster than 24x can be very noisy which is not surprising as the spindle speed can be as high as 12000 RPM which is much faster than for example a harddisk.
If the drive only needs to access the CD for a short period of time, for example software installation, then this is not such a big problem.
But it can get irritating when you're using the drive to play MP3 files. In many cases the noise from the drive is louder than the sound from the audio file.
The data rate of a MP3 file is usually about 16 KB/sec (@128 kbps) which equals to approximately 0.1X! So a reading speed of 4X is more then adequate for playing MP3's.
- Spin-up/down times: Another disadvantage of high speed drives is that the spin-up/spin-down times are high too.
After a few seconds of inactivity the drive slows down and eventually stops. When the application needs more data from the CD, the drive spins up again. The spin-up time can be as high as 10 seconds. In this time the application freezes because it has to wait for the data.
This is especially irritating when playing games.
With Nero DriveSpeed you can also change the spin-down time. The default value is 2 minutes with most drives.
- Reading damaged discs: When a drive has trouble reading a disc, it automatically slows down and reads the bad sectors again.
After reading the bad sectors, the drive usually spins up again. If there are many errors on the disc then the drive will constantly spin-up/spin-down. This is very bad for the mechanical parts of the drive.
By slowing down the drive by software, the drive does not need to change the speed while reading a damaged disc.
- Increase DAE speed: You can also use Nero DriveSpeed to increase the DAE speed with some drives.
Asus drives for example set the default DAE speed to 8X while these drives are actually capable of DAE at up to 20X or even higher!
Changes in Nero DriveSpeed 3.00 :
- Added seven new methods to detect the speed settings
- Increased compatibility
- Added Silent, Fast and Stop buttons
- Fixed command line parameter bug
- Small improvements and bug fixes
• Related downloads:
- Nero DiscSpeed: is a benchmark which can test the most important features of an optical drive.
- Nero DVD Speed: is a DVD-ROM benchmark which can test the most important features of a DVD-ROM drive.
- Nero InfoTool: is a utility which analyses and displays the most important information about a drive, disc, configuration and software.
- VSO Inspector: Using this freeware, you can check the listed cd and dvd readers and writers connected to your computer...
- CDCheck: is a utility for the prevention, detection and recovery of damaged files on CD-ROMs with an emphasis on error detection.
|
