SCSI CD still beats ATA

[guzik]

I just run some tests on my CD drives, to determine the best configuration for a giant task of transforming my CD library into MP3.
Drives are: 4 months old DVD 16x ATA (supposedly 40xCD), 3 years old SCSI CD 24x, 6 months old SCSI-2 CD-RW 12/10/32.
I put first handy game CD and run Sandra: ATA scored 1276 - used on average 30% CPU; SCSI/24 was 2% better, and SCSI-2/32 was 20% better - both used on average 2% CPU.
Now, the real life: Using eac copied each time the same 3 tracks from a music CD.
ATA = speed 3.7x, time 4'45", CPU usage 24-28%
SCSI = speed 5.6x, time 3'11", CPU usage 2-5%
SCSI-2 = speed 12.3x, time 1'17", CPU usage 4-9%.
hard drive is 60G ATA Barracuda, RAM is 512MB DDR @133MHz, CPU is P4@2.13GHz@133MHz
I guess no comment is necessary. Now I'm banging my head into the wall for buying chepo DVD instead SCSI one, as I have quite some DVD ripping planned, and I bet the scores would be similar.

 

[WhoDeeny]

Dude, everybody knows SCSI beats ATA already!

 

[Eug]

My IDE CDRW drive (24X write, 40X read), rips CDs at 40X in the last track. No errors. For the last three tracks I'm guessing at least 35X. Even my combo drive (IDE DVD/CDRW) in my laptop does 6X for the last track.

Bottom line is that your DVD drive is not a good CD ripper. Buying the same drive in SCSI would likely give you the same crappy results. The benefit of SCSI here is decreased CPU utilization, not speed.

BTW, I use the laptop (iBook) to rip all my CDs to MP3 (about 30 GB worth now), simply because Apple's iTunes software is better than all the PC software out there. I'm getting a Firewire enclosure for the 40X ripper. I wonder how much faster conversion to MP3 I can get with it on my iBook.

 

[hausdave]

the problem is trying to find a scsi internal DVD-RW....I don't think anybody makes one.

 

[guzik]

You might be right that problem with my DVD drive is not being ATA - but being "cheapo".
Still CPU utilization is of some importance since mp encoder uses everything available, up to 100%