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> From: PMCSTECH
> To: PassMark
>
> What about a separate program that test CD-R/W
> burners ability to write at different speeds, etc?
> Is this feasible? I can't see it being
> feasible included in BurnInTest as I run continual looping tests
> due to requirements to change media after its full.
There is no standard functionality in Windows to support CD burners (although this changed slightly in Windows XP, which has some very basic support). This means that it is a major effort to write software for burning CDs as you need to potentially write different software for each different manufacturers drive. The effort of testing CD burning software is similarly long and expensive due to the need to test on so much different hardware.
To test CD burners we suggest that you use 3rd party, drive letter assignment (DLA) software, to mount the CD burner as a large floppy disk. Once the burner has been mounted it is possible to use the existing hard disk test in BurnInTest to test the CD burner. There is no need to change the media if CD-RW discs are used as BurnInTest deletes the test files once the disc is full.
We had tested this with a couple of different DLA packages. (e.g. InCD from Nero) and found that while a lot of this software still has some annoying bugs the concept works well. You can see the result of our testing here,
http://www.passmark.com/ftp/BITCDRWtesting.pdf
David
> To: PassMark
>
> What about a separate program that test CD-R/W
> burners ability to write at different speeds, etc?
> Is this feasible? I can't see it being
> feasible included in BurnInTest as I run continual looping tests
> due to requirements to change media after its full.
There is no standard functionality in Windows to support CD burners (although this changed slightly in Windows XP, which has some very basic support). This means that it is a major effort to write software for burning CDs as you need to potentially write different software for each different manufacturers drive. The effort of testing CD burning software is similarly long and expensive due to the need to test on so much different hardware.
To test CD burners we suggest that you use 3rd party, drive letter assignment (DLA) software, to mount the CD burner as a large floppy disk. Once the burner has been mounted it is possible to use the existing hard disk test in BurnInTest to test the CD burner. There is no need to change the media if CD-RW discs are used as BurnInTest deletes the test files once the disc is full.
We had tested this with a couple of different DLA packages. (e.g. InCD from Nero) and found that while a lot of this software still has some annoying bugs the concept works well. You can see the result of our testing here,
http://www.passmark.com/ftp/BITCDRWtesting.pdf
David