40X Panasonic CR-593
For $49 why bother getting anything other then a 40X CD-ROM? Sure you could get a 72X CD-ROM these days, but it won't be as inexpensive. Panasonic has always been a staple CD-ROM manufacturer, and we recently picked up this little 40X CD ROM for a bare bones system we're building where price is the deciding factor - but does a low budget mean low performance?
The Panasonic CR-593-B is made by Matshita and sports the typical front end
of your average CD-ROM. Features of this drive include:
- Numbered volume control wheel
- Head Phone Jack
- Disc Bootable: yes
- Drive activity light
- Analog and Digital Audio output
- E-IDE / ATAPI interface
- Geared tray
- Cost ~$50 CDN
|
That stuff is all well and good, but how about a few
benchmarks to wet the appetite. We tested the CR-593 on Sandra, Maxa CD Pro and
CD Speed.
| MAXA CD-PRO Benchmarks |
40X Panasonic |
40X Sony |
24X
CyberDrive |
|
|
CR-593 |
CDU4011-10 |
CD240D |
| Cache Size |
1.27MB |
1.27mb
|
1.27mb |
| Transfer Rate |
2.3Mb/s |
1.97mb/s |
1.71mb/s |
| Read Ahead Size |
1.05Mb |
1.05mb |
1.05mb |
| CPU Load |
61% |
69% |
75% |
| Avg. Access Time |
0.097sec |
0.085sec |
0.136sec |
| Speed Factor |
13-speed |
13-speed |
11-speed |
| ROMark |
6.8 |
7.5 |
5.0 |
CD Pro showed of some decent
performance from Panasonic's 40X drive, even beating Sony in the CPU Load & Transfer area by a few percentiles. Sony came back
in the second round to kick Panasonic's butt over access time, and left with
the higher ROMark.
Sandra's benchmarks proved the drive to be quite good. Just for fun we tested
it with DMA enabled and without DMA enabled to see what the difference in
performance might be.
|
|
| Benchmark with
DMA enabled yeilds an index value of 1867. |
|
|
| The results of benchmarking with DMA disabled illustrates
a 70 point drop in performance with this particular drive. Unfortunately
even with DMA enabled the drive scores below that of a 32X reference CDROM
in Sandra. |
| Sandra Specs |
| DMA |
Disabled |
Enabled |
| Drive Tech |
18X |
18x |
| Spindle speed |
9445 RPM |
9752 RPM |
| Buffered Read |
340 Mb/s |
381 Mb/s |
| Sequential Read |
2673 Kb/s |
2760 Kb/s |
| Random Read |
482 Kb/s |
528 Kb/s |
| Avg access time |
89 ms |
78ms |
| Drive type |
Matshita CD-ROM
CR-593 |
CD-Speed gives a nice picture of how the drive performs throughout a CD-ROM.
Showing an average speed of 22.23X and a random access time of 80ms, it
shows a lower CPU usage then the CD pro benchmark. At 8x (maximum shown) the CPU
usage is at 33%.
From the graph we can see the drive speed comes up to 24X but never crosses
it. Actual performance is more akin to 24X, rather then 40X.
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