For testing CD reading speed, CD Speed 99 was used, while for testing writing speed (both R's and RW's) Click'n Burn Plus was used, unless otherwise stated.

Reading Tests

    The following tests are broken down into three parts, a data CD was tested using CD Speed 99, the same CD (671MB) was then copied to a Maxtor D740X series hard drive and the time taken to finish the copy was recorded.  A CD-RW was also tested, again using CD Speed.  And lastly an audio CD was then tested (76:06) using CD Speed again and quality was tested using CDDAE to check for any errors in the ripping process.

    Lets first look at how the MSI fares against a DVD drive and an older CD writer in reading a pressed CD.  Lets look at the time it took to copy the contents of the CD onto the hard drive and then look at the CD Speed results.

    First lets look at the raw speed of these drives.  The MSI is tied for the honor of fastest drive with the Pioneer 40X DVD player.  The Pioneer over achieves while the MSI is under achieving, at maximum it is about 5X(750KB/s) slower than its rated speed.  Though any of these drives is definitely fast enough for transferring you data to disk or doing some heavy reading from the CD.

    Now what about the seek times, how fast can the drive find a piece of data.  We see that the Plextor, along with most CDRW's of its generation has a terrible seek time, which could slow it down when reading a CD.  The MSI is actually has a lower seek time than the dedicated DVD/CD player in the Pioneer drive.  The drive's CPU usage, thanks to its us of UDMA 33, is better than the other two drives by a couple of percentage points at all speeds.  This helps take the load off the CPU for reading from the drive

    What about with a CDRW, does this make any difference in the read speed of these drives, lets see.

    What do these results show?  The results for each drive is dramatically different, the Plextor and Pioneer are very erratic, while the MSI drive is fairly consistent with its other CD tests.  The MSI was easily the best of this group in reading an RW, averaging 24X speeds while only having a small 'blip' in its results near the end.  The other drives had problems with reading this disk, the Plextor did fine until about minute 25 when the drive had problems; the Pioneer looks like it is trying to read in CLV instead of CAV and has problems with the disk.

    What about ripping audio CD's, does the MSI perform like it did with the RW's or like it does with a regular CD.

    We see that the drive performs almost exactly like it does with a pressed CD, with a maximum ripping speed of 43X, actually 3X (450KB/s) faster than its rated maximum audio ripping speed.  The Plextor has a maximum ripping speed of 22X and both it and the Pioneer, which uses CLV for audio ripping, average half the ripping speed of the MSI drive.  And as a note, none of the drives had any errors with the ripped CD's.

    We know that the DragonWriter is a very fast reader, but how fast is it in the one area that it was designed to excel at, writing both CDR's and CDRW's, lets see.

Writing Tests

    How fast is this drive at writing CD's, does it reach its rated 40X speed for writing?  Lets see the results:

    Well the results confirm that the drive doesn't write at a constant 40X, but rather it uses CAV to reach a maximum of 40X with both Nero Burning Rom and a 40X disk.  The standard  disks were 32X maximum disks that cost all of $0.20-0.30 (Canadian) per disk, and even these performed very well, not quite tripling the performance of my good old Plextor writer.  This allowed the burning of disks in about 4 minutes, including the lead in and lead out time (about 40-60 seconds). 

    How well does this perform with RW's, is it 3X faster than the Plextor, as the specifications state.

    The MSI doesn't quite make its rated speed of 12X, perhaps due to the fact that the disks might not have been 12X capable.  The drive is almost 3X the speed of the Plextor, as its rated speed indicates.  The drive managed to finish erasing the entire disk in under 7 minutes, where for the Plextor you could go out for a coffee break and then come back in 15 minutes and it still wouldn't be done erasing completely.

Conclusions

    So we've seen the hardware, and the software that comes with the MSI DragonWriter.  We've also seen how well the drive performs in reading different disks, and also how fast it writes to both blank CDR's and RW's.  So what can we conclude?  Well lets look at it point by point.

    The drive itself is noting out of the ordinary, but its support for Seamless Link™, its fast access time, and its fast writing speed all point to a very fast drive that will be able to stop coasters from being created.  There is one slight issue the front panel being poorly designed, but this isn't a major issue.   The drive also supports UDMA 33 to lower CPU usage when using the drive.

    The software is among the top of its class, as Nero is the most fully featured CD burning program that I've come across.  InCD seems to have a better compatibility ratio than any of the other packet writing software I've come upon, but that isn't saying that much.

    The reading speed of this drive at the top of its class, it is faster than either of the other two drives tested when you look at all the tests.   The CD ripping speed was amazing, as it was just as fast as the reading speed of the drive, and was double the speed of either of the other two drives at extracting the audio and produced no errors on the entire disk.  The other results are very good and put it as fast or faster than the other drives.

    The writing speed was faster than the 8X Plextor used for comparison, as one would hope for, but didn't quite reach the 40X writing speed that it was stated to reach.   Either way this drive can write a full 700MB CDR in less than 4 minutes, including both lead in and out times.  The RW speed was fairly impressive as well, not that it was blazing fast like the rated 40X for writing, but it still allows for the erasing of a RW in less than seven minutes.

    Now what does it cost to own this drive.  The drive costs, according to Pricewatch, about $59 US for the retail package tested here.  Is it worth this price?  I when I bought my Plextor drive a year ago it cost in the range of $160 (US) and even that was a good price.  Prices for CDRW drives have gone down recently, and this drive is very competitive with the more generic brand names, and has the added benefit of being from MSI, which helps people feel more comfortable in buying it.  I can't see a reason for anyone who either has an older drive (pre-burnproof) or is looking at purchasing their first RW to not add this to a very short list of good drives, along with Plextor and Lite-On drives.

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