TEAC CD-540E

TEAC CD-540E:

Speed test:

The first and surely most important testcriteria is the speed of the CD-ROM drive. Our CD-ROM benchmark results the following values according to the CD-type:

The single average transfer rates are in those regions, which faster CD-drives can reach. Extra mentionable is, that the CD-540E delivers with 7.96/8.00 the top-value concerning the benchmark ROMarks (this is valued by the access times) of all tested CD-drives at original CD/blue CD-R. Opposite to this highlight stand the poor value of 4.40 at green CD-R. This value tarnishes the good impression. As you can see in the table, the reason for this low benchmark are the extemly high maximum access times (forward and backward). Those appear regular on the CD and can be so explained: the reading head is too fast and has to reduce its speed. This takes its time and so elongates the access time. After this reduction the drives switches to maximum speed at once. The fastest access lies in those regions of other CD-types at 40 ms, so that a ROMark-value of 8.0 could be surely possible without the 5-6 runaways.
The reading of rewritable ruffians is a special subject of the drive. With a not earlier reached 8.56 ROMarks the drive stand unchallenged on the first place. The access times are the smallest ever reached, a average of 80 ms has not been obtained anyway. A strong result!
To a confirmation of the average access time we copied a full original CD of 552 MB size to the hard disk. The drive needs 3:34 min, so that we can achieve a average transfer rate of 2641.3 KB/s or 17.6x CD. This confirms the upper value of the benchmark.

Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) / Audiograbbing:

The extraction of audio tracks gets more important since the introduction of the MP3-fomat. We have tested the extraction speed with the help of the Audio Catalyst software. On a full, 74 minutes CD we get the following speed per track:

Picture 1: Audioextraction speed

As usual you can see, that the extraction speed increases to the border of the audio-CD. But the maximum speed of 9.85x at the last track is too small in todays comparison. Speeds of 15x-20x extraction are no problems for todays drives. Here the CD-540E is not recommended.