Michael Nadeau
Quad-speed CD-ROM drives are the industry standard, but a new crop of six-speed CD-ROM drives with 900-Kbps data transfer rates should appeal to multimedia aficionados and network managers who want improved performance from their CD-ROM jukebox towers. Plextor's 6PleX drive should be followed by other six-speed CD-ROM drive offerings this year from such vendors as TEAC, NEC Technologies, and Wearnes.
Hard-core multimedia users will pay the steep premium ($600 for a bare six-speed drive versus about $200 for a quad-speed model) for a performance boost. "People still say `I just want [six-speed drives] for games,"' says Felix Nemirovsky, engineering manager at Plextor (Santa Clara, CA). Nemirovsky notes, however, that a six-speed drive ru
nning on anything less than a Pentium system will show only marginal gains. Sophisticated animation and video sequences are the most demanding data types to play off a CD-ROM, and so their performance will see the greatest boost with a six-speed drive (see the benchmark table
"Six Times Faster"
).
Perhaps even more significant, six-speed drives will make software-only MPEG compression and decompression much more viable. Acceptable playback of MPEG video generally requires a hardware codec. The two key bottlenecks that had held back software MPEG, according to Sorin Papuk, software development manager at MPEG codec vendor CompCore Multimedia (Sunnyvale, CA), were slow graphics acceleration under Windows and slow CD-ROM access rates. The latest PCI-based graphics boards and six-speed drives change that. "One year ago, software MPEG was a `teasing' technology," says Papuk. "[It is] not yet fully equal to hardware MPEG, but it is closing the gap fast."
Networked CD-ROMs present a
different kind of performance issue. On a network, you might have 50 people trying to access, say, a seven-drive tower at the same time. The faster those drives locate and read the data, the faster the tower can process all 50 requests. The tower must queue and register I/O for all requests; therefore, a few milliseconds' difference in the access time can improve overall throughput.
As prices drop, six-speed drives will replace quad-speed models. It took about 14 months for quad-speed drive prices to reach mainstream levels, says Julie Schwerin, president of research firm InfoTech (Woodstock, VT). "By this time next year," Schwerin says, "six-speed drives could be standard items."
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The National Software Testing Labs' InterMark benchmarks (in transactions per second) show the difference between a Mitsumi quad-speed drive and a Plextor six-speed drive running on the same 90-MHz Pentium system. The Random Access results indicate typical performance. Sequential access suggests the type of performance you will see reading large files, such as video. The last two tests measure performance when a drive slows itself down to read poorly recorded or damaged discs. Higher numbers are better.
6X Yields Better Software MPEG and Networking
