The DVD Matrix by Rossi Fernandes and Aliasgar Pardawala

Test Bench
The system, which we used for running the tests, was an AMD Athlon 650 with 256 MB of SDRAM, a TNT2 3D card with 16 MB of VRAM and 8.4 GB Seagate IDE drive. The operating system was Windows 98SE loaded in an optimised state with no startup programs at 1024x768 resolution and 16-bit colours. An Adaptec SCSI card was installed for the DVD drives with a SCSI interface.

Test Parameters
Apart from sheer performance in a series of tests, we also checked the drives for other features and accessories. The presence of manuals, installation CDs, other bundled software, etc, were aspects that were noticed.

Performance Tests
The tests, which were performed to retrieve the best performing DVD drives, were as follows:

Ziff Davis CD Winbench 99 : ZD CD Winbench 99 was one of the most prominent tests we ran on the DVD drives. It checks for average access speed and data transfer speeds and other minute features such as CPU Utilisation and also creates graphs for these tests. This was the main test and was accorded 25 per cent of the total weightage among all the tests.

SiSoft Sandra 2000 : SiSoft Sandra 2000 is similar to ZD CD Winbench 99, and tested the various parts of the drive. SiSoft gave a complete detailed report on aspects such as data speeds and access times. It also gave the DVD read speed and the CD read speeds. The SiSoft Sandra 2000 test had a weightage similar to CD Winbench, and out of the 25 per cent weightage, sequential read, random read and access time were given 7 per cent weightage, while the SiSoft Index had a weightage of 4 per cent.

Audio Catalyst DAE Test : The Digital Audio Extraction test was run using a software called Audiocatalyst. Using a common audio CD, three tracks were encoded from the CD to a Wav file. The time taken by the drive to encode each of the tracks was then noted, and this gave us the DAE performance of the drives. This test was given 10 per cent weightage.

CD Error Test : For the CD Error Test, we made some scratches on a CD so that the DVD drive detected the CD as having errors. Then, we tested the error correction ability of the drives. The time taken for the error correction test and the number of errors found on the CD were noted down and compared with the performance of the other drives. The weightage allotted for the time taken to perform the test was 4 per cent and for the errors found was 6 per cent.

Time for copying a single 100 MB file : To check the data transfer speeds of the files, we copied a common 100 MB file from a CD to the hard disk and noted the time taken. Data transfer speeds are often one of the main concerns while buying DVD drives. This test had a 7 per cent weightage.

Time for copying several 10 MB files : This test was similar to the previous test, and the only difference was that instead of copying one file, here 10 files of 10 MB size each were copied from a CD to the hard disk. This was done to check the access time and the time taken to move to the next file. This test had a weightage of 8 per cent.

Opening high-resolution images in Adobe Photoshop : The last test we conducted on the drives was the opening of 10 Tiff images of around 10 MB each from the CD in Adobe Photoshop. This test really tested the drive to its maximum. The time taken to display the images in Photoshop was noted and compared with the other drives. This test had a weightage of 15 per cent.

Overall Rating After these tests and procedures were completed, we made a sum of their scores to find out the overall score for each of the drives. The one with the best overall score was obviously the best performing DVD Drive.