The Asus CRW5224A - 52X CDRW Drive
The fastest rated burn speed on the planet.. for now.

By Dave Altavilla
December 13, 2002

Installing one of these CDRW drives from Asus, is as easy as installing a normal CDROM drive.  Just find an empty 5 1/4" bay in your case, screw it in, connect the cables and you'll be off ripping and burning in no time.

Software Included With The Asus CRW5224A Nero goodness

The Asus CRW5224A ships with one CD of bundled software.  While there may not be as many application titles in the box, compared to a Plextor drive for example, the quality and features of Ahead Software's "Nero Express" Suite is second to none.  This CDR Burning software package does it all, Burning, Ripping, Converting,  even testing with their "Nero Toolkit".

Nero's Express CD Creator
 
             

As you can see, Nero Express detects the drive's 52X capabilities and notes writing at 7800 KB/sec rates are available.  From there you can rip MP3s from a disc, convert MP3s to WMA for playing in standard CD Audio players, compile data or picture CDs,  erase and re-write CDRW discs or create a duplicate copy of a CD from another CD.  Basically, anything you could do with a CDRW drive, is supported in this application.  Probably the nicest feature, is that Nero Express will also time all of these functions for you, so you can tell how fast your process is going and if the drive is operating at optimal performance.

Nero Express Label Maker
 
          

Finally, Nero Express also includes a label maker tool, which will allow you to design custom labels for the CD creations you cut from your new CDRW drive.  This is obviously handy for identifying all those new discs you'll be turning out at blinding speeds.  Speaking of which, let's fire this thing up and see how it runs.

HotHardware Test Systems P4 Horsepower

CD-ROM Performance Tests - Plextor PX-W4824TA Stop! NERO Time!

Nero InfoTool

Ahead's Nero Info Tool gives us a report on the Asus CRW5224A's features and capabilities.  As you can see, versus the Plextor 48X unit, the Asus drive actually has a smaller cache at 2Mb versus the 4Mb cache in the Plextor drive.  This may or may not equate to faster performance or more stable burns.  We'll have to see the results for ourselves in testing.

SiSoft SANDRA:

There is no clear advantage for either drive in the SANDRA CD/DVD File System benchmark.  The Asus 52X drive, did hold a slight lead, but it was within the margin of error for this test. We tested the drives with a retail version Quake 3 CD, and compared the scores to the a reference LiteOn 16X DVD / 48X CDROM drive.  The LiteOn drive shows faster performance at 23X with the two burners coming in at 21X.

Nero CD Speed - Data:

Next we used Nero CD Speed to test the performance of these drives reading a data CD and had some interesting results.  The 52X Asus drive managed to outperform the 48X Plextor model by a sizable margin.  The Asus CRW5224A also had slightly lower CPU utilization across the board, but the seek times on the Asus burner are significantly slower.  Regardless, in the end, the Asus drive averages a 37X read across the disc and the Plextor 48X drive only manages 28X.

More Nero CD Speed, MP3 Encoding, And Full Disc Buring