Benchmarking methodology
Tests were conducted on a 1.33GHz Athlon system using a KT7A-RAID motherboard with 512MB of RAM. Because some of the included applications didn't list Windows XP compatibility, Windows 2000 with Service Pack 2 was used. A 30GB IBM 60GXP was configured as primary master; there was no primary slave. When testing a recordable DVD drive, that drive was hooked up as the secondary master; there was no secondary slave. Each drive used the latest firmware revision available on the manufacturer's website at the time the testing commenced. For the Pioneer, this was version 1.55; for the Philips, it was version 1.34.

With the exception of the write tests, each test was run at least twice, and the results averaged. The CD Speed and DVD Speed results shown are a representative test run chosen from at least two test runs. If multiple test runs varied significantly, it will be noted when that test result is presented.

Before we get into the benchmarks, here's a quick table summarizing the rated speeds of each drive:

File Copy
The file copy test involved copying approximately 625MB of data from CD to hard drive. For each drive, the test was performed with three different types of media: a pressed CD, a CD-R and a CD-RW. The CD-R and CD-RW discs were recorded with a CD-RW drive not included in this test, and were a disc-to-disc copy of the pressed CD.

As noted earlier, the specifications of the two drives differ significantly, and this stark contrast shows up immediately on the file copy benchmarks. The Philips drive, with its 32X CD read speed, handily beats the Pioneer on all three media types. The Pioneer drive does fairly well with the pressed CD, but it's obvious the drive slows things down when reading a recordable or rewriteable CD. The Philips' consistency is remarkable, especially on rewriteable media, which has a lower reflectivity that causes many drives to slow down.

Disc Recognition
This is a test I originally came up with for my review of 24X CD-RW drives. One thing that has always annoyed me is Windows' behavior when it deals with a media change in a CD drive. Explorer windows will freeze up or even go entirely blank until the disc has been read and its label reported. Annoying. Although this problem isn't the fault of the hardware, it's something users have to live with. Consequently, I decided to use a stopwatch to measure the time it takes each drive to report a volume label back to Windows. I started the stopwatch at the same time I pressed the drive's load/eject button, and stopped the watch when an Explorer window opened to My Computer showed the new volume label. Because the hand timing could increase the variance between trials, I did four trials of each possible test combination; each drive was tested with the following media types: pressed CD, CD-R, CD-RW, pressed DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW.

The Philips drive takes this one, coming in with faster recognition times for five of the seven media types. Curiously, each drive seems to be better at reading the other's DVD rewriteable format than its own.