8x CD-ROM Drive Slower than a slug
Darwin’s theory tells us that CD-ROM drives have survived these past 10 years because each generation has been at least marginally faster than the last. Why then does Philips’ new PCA80SC 8x SCSI drive deliver performance reminiscent of primordial ooze?
The PCA80SC has all the trappings of a premium product: SCSI-2 interface, Win95 Plug-and-Play compatibility, and a sustained data-transfer rate of l,200K/sec. Philips targets the drive at professionals using large graphics files and MPEG-encoded video. But during our tests, conducted with Ziff-Davis’ WinBench 96 benchmarking software running on a generic 166MHz Pentium system with an Adaptec 2940 SCSI interface card, the drive exhibited performance way below par.
We were taken aback by the drive’s average access time of just 215ms and its average data-transfer rate of only 545K/sec. In recent tests, other 8x drives (see “8x Drive By” in boot 02) displayed average access times of 143ms and average data-transfer rates of 722K/sec. Philips claims the drive is optimized for reading very large files from CD-ROMs, so we opened a number of 15MB and larger images from a CD-ROM-based clip-art library using Hijaak Pro and recorded the time the drive needed to open each file. For the sake of comparison, we then reinstalled the TEAC 6x IDE/ATAPI drive previously installed in our 166 and opened the same files. Surprise! The TEAC 6x opened about half the files faster than the Philips 8x and was only marginally slower opening the other half.
In terms of CPU utilization, the Philips monopolized only 30 percent of the CPU’s power, compared to 56 percent for the TEAC. This makes the Philips well suited for applications such as streaming video off disc. But even in this area, the drive didn’t perform as well as other 8x SCSI drives we’ve tested. (NEC’s MultiSpin 8Xi SCSI drive, for example, consumed just 24 percent of the CPU’s clock cycles during last month’s testing.)
And don’t be alarmed if stray dogs gather around your chair every time you fire up this drive; it emits an annoying high-pitch whine when spun up. Philips claims this is normal with drives accessing at fast speeds, but we’ve never noticed this phenomenon with other drives.
Considering Philips’ position as the co-inventor of the CD-ROM, you might expect its drives to be performance leaders. But we’d relegate the PCA80SC to the back of the class.
— Bryan Del Rizzo
