ASUS QuieTrack CRW-5232AS & CD-S520 are examined for noise performance in SPCR's second optical drive review. The new optical drives fare well against earlier ones regarded as quiet — or at least noise-reduced.

Nice review Mike, thanks.

Looks like it is still the Samsung for a combo drive, need one in black to go in the BQE case. Now if I could only find a retail version with the 8MB cache rather than the OEMs with the 2MB cache

good review!

...let me know when you get to the TDK drives. I will be all ears! I have been moving more to the externals connected via USB2 and it would be nice to know how those stand!

nice review.

now if it was DVD, and 8MB cache !
It's still a good step in the right direction.

Right now my Sony DVD drive spins up and sounds like it's preparing to explode. I tried the Nero spin drive utility that will load with windows and allows you to ratchet down the speed, and adjust the idle timer...

Lowering the speed seemed to work, but the idle adjust didn't work.
I rarely burn DVD's or CD's, so I just need a silent DVD reader.

Future games seem to be heading to DVD format over a stack of CD's.

I got an email response from Asus that Quie Track will be available
on DVD-RW and DVD-ROM drives in June.

very cool.

Anyone know when the Asus Quietrack DVD-RWs are out? I've checked their global, US and British sites but they haven't shown up on them yet...

Pete

I think that since all optical drives will be rather loud when they spin the disk at 40x-50x CD speeds, decreasing that noise with a few dBA-s has no practical importance. So I think the features of QuieTrack that address that issue are quite useless, so is measuring them. What does mater that QuieTrack drives will not spin the disk at maximum speed, unless there is an excessive demand for the content of the disk. Like, if you copy big files to the HDD, it will spin up to maximum speed, and it will be too loud to withstand for extended period of time, no mater what trick they apply, but the copying will be finished after a few minutes together with the noise anyway. But if you play back an avi from a CD/DVD or a DVD-Video, it will intelligently remain at lower speeds, since that's enough to feed the media player. This is what matters about QuietTrack. Especially as watching a film takes 90 minutes or so, not like copying some files to the HDD. Also, for gamers, even when there is a high demand for the content, it will wait a few moments before start spinning like crazy, so maybe you can avoid that storm at starting (but I didn't tried this one).

Now, I have personal experience with Asus DRW-1612BL (a QuieTrack DVD rewriter). I have to say that if you consider the kind of usages like movie watching, it is NOT for those who are particular about noise. For an average noisy computer its noise level while paying back movies is OK, but you can most certainly achieve better results with a drive that listens to DriveSpeed to go down to 4x CD speed or like (this drive totally ignores DriveSpeed). QuieTrack just spins the disk too fast, maybe about x8 CD speed for avi-s, judged from the noise, and even faster for DVD-Videos (which I find rather disappointing, since the user can copy avi-s to the HDD easily before watching them, but doing the same with DVD-Videos is much much more painful). A Plextor PX-716A, in the same computer, is far quieter when limited to 2-5x CAV for DVD and x4 CLV for CD (you can do it with PlexTools that comes with the box edition). The Plextor stuff is practically inaudible unless you watch a silent film with a rather quiet computer, and from as many I have tested it, it didn't suffer from shuttering at these low speeds (while the Asus drive did with an original unscratched DVD-Video that was also played in the PX-716A without any shuttering). So, too bad, Asus QuieTrack, with this model at least, is not for hardcore silencers. Well, except if you only play back avi-s, and don't sit near to the computer.