Are quad speed drives really faster?
—————————————– Cheryl England’s article in the December, 1994 MacUser found that the double speed Apple CD300e Plus beat quadruple speed drives in overall performance. This was a surprise to many people, including me. A June, 1995 Macworld article by James Martin found essentially the same results when using multimedia titles and retrieving Photo CD images. However, the Macworld test showed that the quad speed drives were dramatically faster when performing text and database searches. There are several possible reasons for the poor showing of quad speed CD-ROMs. England hinted that the Finder itself was one of them. When files were copied from CD-ROM to the hard disk using DiskTop, the quad speed was about 35% faster. In some cases, poor driver software crippled the quad speed drives. In contrast, Apple CD-ROM drives like the CD300 tend to have excellent driver software. Geoff Duncan wrote an excellent TidBITS article on some of the issues involved with quad
