Nero CD Speed


Our first test began with Nero CD Speed 99 where we test the reading speed of the drive, and calculate the seek times on three different types of media discs. The first was a pressed data CD (Ziff-Davis' CD Winbench 99), the second was an Audio CD (Depeche Mode's Ultra album) and the last was a HS 10x CD-RW disc (Various files). The results are as follows.

As you can see, the Panther's reading performance was pretty average. With a read rating of 40x, we're sure it could have done better. It's performance in the CD-RW test was one of the lowest we have seen to date, and CPU Usage was slightly high for this drive but that is more due to the USB 2.0 connectivity. In fact we would consider it's CPU Usage score to be low for a USB 2.0 drive, as compared to some external USB 1.1 CD-RW drives. Seek Times scores were pretty good as well for this drive except for, again, the CD-RW test.

The Panther reading a data disc using CAV method.

The Panther reading an audio disc using CAV method.

The Iomega Panther drive isn't loud at all. The only noticeable sound we heard was the hissing sound it made whenever a new CD was being accessed. This only happens during the initial bootup stage and is fairly common among both CD-RW and CD-ROM drives. Other than that, the Panther is pretty quiet. Next we tested the Panther drive with Ziff-Davis Media's CD Winbench 99 in a head-to-head contset with two other CD-RW drive readers, namely the Yamaha CRW2200E and the Plextor PX-W2410TA.


Ziff-Davis Media CD Winbench 99

The Panther performed remarkably well in CD WinBench. The drive came out tops even against Plextor. Most notable were the overall high WinMark and Disk Access Time scores (fastest). Though the transfer rate of the drive is slower than the Plextor, it is faster than the Yamaha drive.