While running tests, I limited them to two basic ones that would give me an overview of the qualities and performance of the drive. SiSoft’s Sandra 2001 benchmarking utility and the speed-measuring device within NERO’s CD burning utility. I used NERO because the burning program did not automatically recognize the Kenwood drive. It then runs a small series of tests to get drive characteristics so that it can read from the drive for burning to the burner. here’s what I came up with...
As you can see, the Kenwood drive outpaced other drives contained within Sandra 2001 by a huge margin. While using the drive daily, I have noticed that the speeds indicated above are pretty accurate. When accessing the drive, it makes short work of the disks that I throw at it and gets the information to the hard drive in record times. Whether I gave it disks with many small files to install, or disks with huge single file installations, it just flew through them without even breathing hard. I’ve been playing with computers for a long while now, and was even one of the first around to even have access to the first 1x CD-ROM drives. I can honestly say that I have never seen a drive perform as fast as this one does. It is a speed demon in every sense of the word. Below is a screenshot of the same test using my CD-RW (rated at 8x4x32). I used the same CD so that there would be no reasons for a questionable result. Check out the difference between the two drives. it’s simply astounding!
Is it any wonder that I’m impressed by the speed of this monster? There is just no comparison when it comes to outright speed. Add to that the low noise levels and the next to non-existent vibration levels and you’ve got a killer drive that anyone would be proud to call their own.
Here is the result of the diagnostic that was run using the NERO burning utility. It takes speed measurements on the drive so that it can use the results to see how to send data from the Kenwood drive to the burner. Again, I found that the speeds that this drive puts out are higher than any others that I have seen. 68x data read and 36x music are nothing to turn your head at.
With all the good things going for this drive, it’s really kind of hard to get ready to put it back into it’s proper place, but you should know the whole story concerning this CD-ROM drive.
