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DVD-ROM

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Nick5324

Diamond Member
I'm looking to pick up a DVD-ROM for my old Athlon XP box. I'm looking for some insight into what the access time is about. They seem to range from 110ms to 150ms. I assume less is better, as this would be faster. Is there really a noticable difference? I also noticed most of the DVD-ROM's have 256k of cache, but Newegg shows a Sony model with 512k. Does this extra cache really matter, or is this overkill like having 256MB of RAM on a low end video card?

Yes, I realize the price difference up to a DVD burner is fairly small, and I may go that route, the question still remains about access times.

Thanks in advance.
 
Lower access time is better, but whether you'll notice it is debatable. All it means is how quickly the drive can move the read head on average, it's the same as hard drive access times just much slower, since it's mechanically moving the head with a motor. If you're reading discs and have to do a lot of seeking, then the difference could build up enough to notice it, but it's not so important I think that it'd be worth paying much extra for. Cache quantity I think is probably also pretty unimportant, since you're not writing to the cache, and even 512k is unlikely to be sufficient to really store much of anything if the drive tried to "read ahead", given the size of files people work with these days. At best it might be able to do a little bit to hide the access latency.

In either case, if it's just a few bucks difference, then go with the better one, but not more than a few bucks.
 
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