Toshiba XM6202B 32X CD-ROM drive

Updated Thursday, July 30, 1998 12:25

Introduction

As it is the case in most of the time with CD-ROM drives, this one has been installed without any problems under Win95 as well as under DOS 6.22 so I have no other specific comments on this point. Once again, this drive, as well as most of any other CD-ROM drives, has no user manuals and comes without any software bundled other than the DOS installation floppy disk.


The Benchmark results

All the tests performed under Win95 (except for the DAE tests)
were conducted with the Bus master and DMA 2 enabled.

The system I used to test this drive was has following:

Motherboard: AOpen AP58
CPU: AMD K6-233mhz
Memory: 32mb SDram (Hyundai)


Winstone98 CDROM tests

XM6202B Winbenc98 GIF results

As we can see here the results are only averaging the performances of this type of drives but we can notice a very low CPU utilisation of this drive. As with other CD-ROM drives of this speed category we can see that reading speeds are getting faster when the outer tracks of the CD are read and the results are showing about 16X for the inner tracks and about 32X for the outer tracks for a CPU utilisation that never goes over 10%. The 14% CPU utilisation of test number 1 is due to the fact that there was some applications running in the background but they all have been closed for test number 2 and 3.



CDspeed

Below, you can see the results from the DOS CDspeed Benchmark. By reading this graphic we can again clearly see how much the transfer rates are gaining when this drive goes from the inner trachs to outer tracks of a CD. The average reading speed obtainned from this drive has roughly reached 20.4X which is a bit deceiving for a 32X CD-ROM drive!

XM6202B


CDstone 4.1

Curiously, the best results for this test as well as any other tests performed under the DOS mode have been obtainned with the AOpen ATAPI driver instead of the Toshiba ATAPI driver. The reason for this is because the Toshiba ATAPI driver was not designed to enable the Bus master mode while the AOpen has been specifically designed to take advantage of this mode as well as the DMA mode 2. Furthermore, all disk cache have been disabled for these tests including the CD-ROM drive. Overall, under these conditions, the results obtainned with CDstone 4.1 were almost 2 times better than those obtainned with the Toshiba ATAPI driver! If it appear that the Toshiba ATAPI drive can effectively enable the BUS MAster mode it is not documented anywhere and as a fact there is even no "Read.me" file of the floppy disk included with this drive, so, there was no way for me to suspect such a possibility form the Toshiba ATAPI driver !


Banc d'essai CDstone 4.1 en mode DOS

Toshiba XM6202B

Mode standard /Q

1 PASSE RESULTATS FINAL
32k block read 4417kps
2k block read 2934kps

Full seek/read 132ms
1/3 seek/read 104ms
Random seek/read 87ms

 CPU USAGE
300k (2X) 3%
600k (4X) 7%
900k (6X) 10%
1200k (8X) 14%
1500k(10X) 17%
1800k(12X) 20%
2100k(14X) 24%
2400k(16X) 27%		 BURST SPEED
 2k 3236kps
4k 4925kps
8k 7349kps
16k 9412kps
32k 11347kps


CD-Stone rating: 167.3



DAE tests (Digital Audio Extraction) under DOS

Concerning the DAE tests performed on this CD-ROM drive we can say that once again they only gave results averaging those obtainned with the 32X CD-ROM drives category. As a fact, the maximum extraction speed obtainned from the Toshiba XM6202B has been 1398KB/sec which is not very high for a drive of this category...


CDDA(Beta) - Ver. 1.7.4 (Build 0x0197)

CDDA(Beta) - Ver. 1.7.4 (Build 0x0197)
ASPI/ATASPI/MSCDEX-SCSI/ATAPI CD-DA/CD+G/CD-XA/CDi-Video Dump Program
(c) Copyright 1993/94/95/96/97, Computall Services

Registered Version. Serial Number: XXXXXXXXXX
MSCDEX drive selected: G
ATASPI Mode
Track: 5
Copy protection bit override
No data mode selected: Defaulting to CDDA data mode
No file format selected: Defaulting to WAV file mode
No sample size selected: Defaulting to 44.1 KHz sample mode
No channel mode selected: Defaulting to Stereo channel mode
CDDA data will not be jitter corrected
Output file: C:\TEST.WAV
Block Length: 40, Overlap Length: 0
Running DOS version 6.22
Number of Adapters found: 1
Searching Adapter/SCSI_ID/LUN for first CD-ROM drive
Using CD-ROM @ Adapter: 0, ID:1, LUN:0

ASPI Manager id: FDC ATASPI16, adapter id: FUTURE DOMAIN
Vendor ID:TOSHIBA , Product ID:CD-ROM XM-6202B , Revision:1110

0 0 0 1 0
DA extraction permitted by CDROM drive

LBA- LIT: 0, LOT: 274210, start: 120492, end: 143396
MSF- LIT: 00:02.00, LOT: 60:58.10, start: 26:48.42, end: 31:53.71

Average DA reading speed: 1503 KB/s

CDDA completed successfully


Many extractions were performed with this drive and tracks number 1, 5 and 10
were succesively extracted several times each with the following results:


Track no: 1= 1119 KB/sec.
Track no: 5 =1503 KB/sec.
Track no: 10 = 1572 KB/sec

In regard of these results the average extraction speed
measured has been 1398 KB/sec which is a very ordinary results after all!

Finally, to make sure that the extracted files were perfect I compared them by extracting the same track several times and I found no difference in the size of the obtainned WAV file and this is a good indication that this drive does good digital audio extraction.


Digital Audio Extraction under Win95

All the DAE tests conducted under Win95 were performed without the BUS master enabled. The average extraction speeds obtainned with Windac 1.41 has been 8.4X and 5X with Audio-Graber.


The Music tests

Unfortunately, it has ben impossible to test this drive with music CDs because the audio cable that went with this drive is not compatible with the audio input connector of the soundcard I am using now. So, as soon as I will get the right cable I will update this page and include the results I obtainned.

The spindown time

As a final note I would like to the suggestion of Vesa Raiskila tell you a word about the spindown time of this drive. From what I measured, the spinup to spindown time of this drive is roughly 20 secondes and this is pretty short. While this might not be a problem for occasionnal users it can rapidly become very annoying on frequent use. As a fact if you need to frequently acces your CD on a short term basis the fact that this drive spindow after 20 seconds is rather annoying because you will have to wait about its spinup time each time you will need to access it so 20 seconds is in my opinion a much to fast spindown time.


The strong points

The strong points of this CD-ROM drive are its low CPU usage, its good access speed and its good reading speed under Win95.


The weak points

The absence of a user manual, its relatively low extraction speed and its poorly designed ATAPI driver are the weak points of this drive. In addition to the weak points of this drive its much to fast spindown time is a very important criteria to consider if you intend to use your CD-ROM drive for long sustainned uses.


Toshiba XM6202B specifications

32X CD ROM Drive
32X CD-ROM Drive
Functional Specifications
Model Number:
XM-6202B Internal ATAPI (enhanced IDE)
Data Transfer Rate:
Sustained Mode 32X 4,800 KB/s (4.8MB/s)
Burst (ATAPI) 16,700 KB/s (16,7 MB/s DMA Mode 1)
Buffer Cache Size (SCSI) 256K
Access Time:
Average Random Seek (32X) ms
Average Random Access (32X) 85 ms
Full Stroke (32X) ms
CLV Rotational Speed (32X) rpm
Compatible CD-ROM Standards: Multisession Photo-CD, CD-Extra, CD-ROM XA, CD-I, Video CD, CDI Ready, CD-G, MPC-3 Compliant, Red Book, Yellow Book, Plug and Play
Audio:
Output Line: 1.0, Headphone 0.7 (volts, rms)
Distortion (1kHz) 0.04% (LPF 20kHz)
Ambient Temperature:
Operating 41° to 122°F (5° to 50°C)
Storage 14° to 140°F (-10° to 60°C)
Operating Humidity (non-condensing) 8% to 80% (wet bulb 27°C max.)
Error Rates:
Unrecoverable - Mode 1 < 1 in 1015
Unrecoverable - Mode 2 < 1 in 1012
Seek < 1 in 106
Mounting Orientation:
Horizontal ± 20°
Vertical ± 10°