Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Asus
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING (cont'd)
The E-Hammer software is used for deleting the contents of a writable disc. “Easy delete” will erase most data from the disc and no optical drive will recognize it, but with the right software some data could possibly be recovered. For a permanent solution, choose “total delete”, which erases the data with no chance of recovery.
Conserving energy is popular these days, and Asus makes it possible to “Go Green” with this drive. The E-Green software will automatically close drive applications while they're not in use and keep you informed of how much energy you're saving.
TESTING
For testing performance of the BW-12B1LT, I used Nero DiscSpeed version 6. It records transfer rate, seek times, CPU usage, and spin up/spin down time and presents the results in an easy to read graph. CD, DVD, and BD media will all be tested.
My test system is as follows:
Motherboard – Asus M4A89TD Pro/USB 3
CPU – AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition
RAM – 2 x 4GB Corsair XMS 3 DDR3
Video – XFX Radeon HD 5670
Storage – Zalman S-Series 128GB SSD
Optical – Asus BW-12B1LT BD Writer
OS – Windows 7 Home Premium, all updates applied
CD READ/WRITE TESTING
To test the drive's read performance of CD media, I used a Magnavox 52x CD-R disc with miscellaneous data on it totaling 79 minutes in length.
The drive performed remarkably well, with read speeds pushing a bit past the max of 48x and peaking at 49x. It doesn't get much better than that.
The drive had no problems writing to a CD at 48x, which is the advertised speed from Asus. Overall, the drive worked very well with all types of CD media I tried – both reading and writing. Not one coaster.
