ASUS CRW-5224A: CDR's Reach The End of the Line

Benchmark

For our benchmark of the ASUS CRW-4012A-U, we ran 4 intensive tests on the drive and the media bundled with the drive.  The tests were all performed on the following testbed with no programs running other than Nero CDSpeed and Nero Burning ROM.  The following is a breakdown of our testbed:

In order to test the drive, we will use the most versatile and widely used benchmarking suites for CDs.  There are several intensive tests inside CDSpeed that we will be using.  The first test is on a 24X rated ASUS CDRW bundled with the drive.  The second test will be using the ASUS 52X CDR media bundled with the drive in order to test the maximum write speed of the drive.  The last and probably most informative test is the maximum data read speeds from the drive.  Remember, the drive is rated at 52X read and write.

We mentioned earlier that the drive burns at 52X at the fastest part of the burn. We can see from our burn tests that the drive peaks at 52X just at the end of the burn.  Slightly interesting was that the drive actually reached speeds just under 52.5X, but our best guess is that 52.5X does not have the best marketing ring to it. 

Even though the CRW-5224A burns using CAV rather than ZCLV, we still achieved impressive results.  The final burn time on the ASUS media that was bundled with the drive was 2:33 on a 700MB dummy file. We received slightly better results with high quality Philips CDR's which we were able to obtain 2:30 burn times on the same dummy file.  It is still going to be a while until there is a plentiful supply of 52X media, so interested buyers of the CRW-5224A might want to get used to burning at 48X for a while.  Midway through Q2 this year, 52X certified media should be plentiful and reasonably priced.

As we noted with the 4012A-U, even with DDS-II, this unit was really loud.  When attempting to spin up, the unit sounds more like a helicopter than a CDRW drive.  Since we have both the 4012A-U and the 5224A in the lab, we actually determined the 5224A was a little louder.  If you have gone out of your way to make your computer as quiet as possible, keep noise in mind when buying this unit.