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The Truth About CD-ROM Drives. If you’ve got one of the new 40x or 48x CD-ROM drives, you may believe you’ve achieved the ultimate in CD-ROM drive performance. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Two factors are involved in a CD-ROM drive's performance. The first is the data transfer rate of the drive. This parameter is widely touted by manufacturers and has been given a good deal of "press". We've gone from single speed drives, with a data transfer rate of 150 Kb/S, to 48x drives at 7200 Kb/S. Speeding up the data transfer rate of a drive is a relatively easy thing to do. A drive's manufacturer designs a drive that simply spins the CD-ROM faster. That's why there's been such a big increase in the data transfer rate of drives in the past few years. It's just not that big a feat to design a drive that spins faster. The other factor affecting a CD-ROM drive's performance is access time, also called seek time. This is the average time it takes to reposition a drive's read head to a new location and start reading data. Access time has improved relatively little in the course of developing new drives with faster and faster data transfer rates. Even with 48x CD-ROM drives, the average time it takes to reposition a drive's read head to a new location and start reading data is at least 100 milliseconds. Compare that with the under 10 millisecond access times of today's hard drives. Access time is the other piece of the CD-ROM drive performance puzzle. By eliminating duplicate drive accesses, CD-Quick Cache will decrease the average access time of any CD-ROM drive. |
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