Kenwood 52X TrueX EIDE CD-ROM

The Test

The AnandTech test bed consisted of the following components:

• Intel Pentium II 400MHz
• Abit BH6
• 64MB Samsung Original PC100 SDRAM
• Matrox Millenium G200 8MB SGRAM
• Western Digital AC35100 - UltraATA
• Windows 98

The latest device drivers were used for all components. Tests were performed using Ziff Davis CD Winbench 99 and Testalabs CD Tach 98. The graphics mode was 1024x768 in 16bit color. Bus mastering DMA was enabled using Windows 98's built in PIIX4 driver.

The advantages of Zen's multibeam technology are many. TrueX drives feature a (mostly) constant transfer rate across the entire disc and lower rotational speeds for quieter operation. The 52X TrueX rotates at about the same speed as a 9.5X drive and is thus incredibly quiet, while still providing hard drive like performance.

Multibeam technology provides solely for transfer rate increases, but does nothing for seek times. In fact, the return to CLV means that the TrueX drives have to change motor speeds as data is read from different areas of the disc, so access times are actually worse than many CAV drives. Within the seven tracks that are being read simultaneously, access time drops to a phenomenal 5ms.

Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) was performed at approximately 12X and the drive reports extraction errors and corrects them in hardware for clean audio every time. That 12X number is just a bit higher than its rotational speed - maybe it cannot yet take complete advantage of multibeam DAE. However, note that 12X is still a very respectable DAE speed. Some drives cannot perform DAE at all or only do it at 1X.

It's also interesting to note that despite supporting only PIO Mode 4 or DMA Mode 2, the CPU utilization scores were excellent. A SCSI version will be available in the second quarter of 1999.