Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing!
And well, let's just go ahead and get this out of here...
[crinkly packaging]
This thing is the Kenwood 72x True-X CD-ROM drive introduced in October of 1999 for a
price of $129.95, at least here in the United States in its initial launch window.
And it doesn't look like anything terribly special externally here.
I mean effectively it is just a compact disc read-only memory drive, used for reading and
installing software on a PC like any other CD drive back then.
But this model right here, the UCR-421, stands alone in the pantheon of CD-ROM drives, with
Kenwood claiming it to be “the fastest drive on Earth!”
And yes, that is the same Kenwood that is probably more known for their home and car
audio equipment, but obviously they have dabbled in PC stuff as well.
And they started selling these True-X drives in 1998 with the Multi-Beam 40x CD-ROM, but
the 72x was the one that received the most attention being that it was the fastest CD-ROM
that Kenwood had made and it's the fastest CD-ROM period.
I've only come across two after looking for about eight years.
Not only are these getting very hard to find at all, but it can be rather tough to find
one working, at least in my experience.
But when they are functioning correctly Kenwood claimed that you would get a blazing fast
transfer rate of 6.75 to 10.8 megabytes per second across the entire disc.
And it did this while only spinning, and this is key, around 2700 to 5100 RPM.
Unlike the next fastest drives back then, the so-called 56x “Max” drives that rotated
at over 11,000 RPM.
This was pretty impressive stuff, not only because it would be quieter than 56 speed
drives, but spinning CDs for too fast for too long can result in... well no more CD.
[compact disc spins rapidly, explodes] Now Kenwood accomplished this speed by reading
seven tracks of data in parallel which is where Zen Research’s
True-X Technology came into play.
So let's up the nerdiness level shall we?
Because True-X still used a single laser beam inside the drive to pull this off, but instead
of shining directly onto the CD, it’s focused through a diffraction grating that splits
the laser into seven beams.
The beams are then narrowed through a collimator lens and then focused through an objective
lens to read the pits and lands on the disc itself.
These then reflect back through those same lenses, bounce off a beam splitter, and are
focused through another lens into a multi-beam detector array.
The signals are then processed through a RISC-based ASIC chipset that processes everything before
sending it off to the CPU of your PC, eliminating additional processing overhead.
The UCR-421 received plenty of positive reviews on launch, earning the PC Stats Editors Choice
Award and a 10 out of 10 on the Hot Hardware Heat Meter, calling it “absolutely flawless.”
But ever since then I've read differing opinions from users saying it wasn't quite all that,
with owners of the device saying that it actually didn't read much faster than competing CD-ROMs,
that it couldn't read burned CDs, that I had problems ripping audio CDs to MP3s, and was
absurdly loud at full speed and vibrated non-stop.
And also that it had problems streaming full motion video from certain games like Diablo II.
So I want to test every single one of those things and see how it is in my experience.
But before we get this installed into a Windows 98 PC let's go ahead and take a brief look
at the hardware specifics itself and some documentation.
And it's nothing terribly special but I feel like it! So, yeah.
From right to left here we have an eject button, a nice little LED for indicating things with an LED.
We have a volume wheel here for the analog audio from CDs as well as a headphone out.
You know, typical stuff that you would see on a CD-ROM drive of the time period.
A four pin molex connector for power, the IDE connection, and then we have the jumpers
over here for cable select stuff.
And then some audio interfaces.
We'll be using this 4-pin one for analog audio so if we want to we can read analog audio
and get Redbook audio off CD-ROMs.
And we also got some documentation.
I never had the box for this, I've never actually seen the box for this.
But one of the units that I got did indeed come with some docs.
So let's check this out.
We have a quick install guide here, which is pretty quick: step 1, step 2.
That's it! [laughs]
You just -- ya plug it in, daggone it.
And that is what you do because it's effectively just a CD-ROM.
Same goes for the manual, there's nothing terribly interesting in here.
It's just like, you know, “thanks for buying our crap.
Here’s some very basic stuff about very basic
high-level information on CD-ROMs, and what to do.
And there's no special software required to operate your 72 speed True-X CD-ROM drive!”
Of course not! That's just standard Windows stuff.
You plug it in, things work.
Unless they don't. But they probably will work, so yeah.
Let's go ahead and get this installed into a Windows 98 PC.
Let’s get the Lazy Green Giant opened up and ready for some blazing fast True-X goodness.
Just slides into into the second slot down, screws in tightly, and we get the requisite
cables connected and that’s that.
Looks like it could do with a little Retrobright now that it’s up against this other CD drive,
but whatever, yellow or not it’s ready to go.
Oh and remember that 56 speed “max” drive I mentioned earlier?
I just so happen to have one of those installed as well, so we’ll be able to directly compare
the Kenwood to one of the next-fastest CD-ROMs available.
And yeah, in terms of setup that’s all we really need to do here, Windows 98 SE will
take care of the rest.
Once again there are no drivers or software, so we’re ready to begin testing.
And while I will be showing doing a proper benchmark in a bit, let’s just do a real-world
kinda test with Diablo II here.
First I’m gonna see how the 56 speed drive fares in terms of performing a standard single
player installation, which consists of 650 megabytes from the first disc.
And on the traditional 56 speed drive here it took 2 minutes and 52 seconds to copy everything
over to the PC’s flash drive storage. A pretty typical time.
I also wanna check out the FMV and a bit of gameplay itself since reviews back then said
that the True-X drives had trouble with Diablo II in particular and I just want to establish
a baseline for how things should look here.
And yep, looks and runs just fine.
Alright, gonna go ahead and uninstall the game as well as remove the temporary files
and anything leftover by the installer, then restart to make sure we get a cleaner test.
And all right it’s time to whip out the Kenwood!
[drive grinds open noisily, LGR chuckling]
What was that?
[drive makes more noise]
Uh. Alright.
[CD plops into tray, drive grinds closed]
Hehe, so it seems this drive’s gears have gone a bit shoddy.
Far as I could tell it’s just the tray mechanism itself and nothing else so it shouldn’t
affect our testing, which begins with installing Diablo II again.
And this time around, wow!
You can immediately tell it’s going much faster with the same exact installation.
It ended up finishing everything in 1 minute, 1 second
nearly three times faster than the 56 speed drive.
Now for the FMV intro cinematic and well, it works perfectly fine, no skips or pauses
or broken audio or anything.
Same goes for the gameplay, it’s just Diablo II and it’s awesome.
On further inspection though, it appears that my drive actually had the latest firmware
applied to it at some point, version 226, which Kenwood released to specifically address
things like Diablo II playability.
All right nice job Kenwood and previous owner of this drive.
Next it’s time for a simple test of sound and vibration, and once again it’s back
to the 56 speed drive.
Which is absolutely terrifying.
[56x drive spins RAPIDLY and LOUDLY]
Seriously, when this thing reaches full speed it’s
one of the loudest, most concerning optical drives I’ve ever experienced.
And as for the TrueX drive?
[72x drive spins, barely audible]
Ah it’s just lovely, it’s barely any louder than
the CPU and power supply fans of the PC itself.
And really I expected as much, seeing as the TrueX drives were built to spin at less than
half the velocity of a 56 speed drive.
Let’s get to a bit more hard data here though and for that we’ll continue using some of
the Nero software suite I have from back in the day.
Specifically Nero CD-DVD Speed, which performs an array of enlightening tests to show us
the transfer rate, seek times, CPU usage and more.
I let it go repeatedly on both drives and once I got some reliable results I had it
generate this handy list of stats.
Let’s look at the transfer rate first, or the effective
speed rating which each drive could pull off.
This is the 56 speed drive here and as you can see, even though it’s rated to go as
high as 56x it never actually attained that, with an average of about 36x.
And that’s typical for CD-ROMs, the speed rating on the box
is just the maximum theoretical transfer rate.
And look at this graph, it shows some fascinating stuff as well.
Being that this is a CAV, or constant angular velocity drive, the yellow line stays flat,
while the green line for transfer rate increases as it moves across the disc.
That’s because on traditional drives like this, the closer the laser is to the inner
portion of the CD, the lower the attainable data rate, since the drive has to spin faster
to process the same amount of data at the outside sections of the disc.
And now look at the True-X drive by comparison.
Not only is the average transfer rate far higher at 65x but it also bumps right up against
its claimed maximum of 72 speed!
And the graph looks entirely different, with the green line reaching higher speeds faster,
and the yellow line decreasing as the drive reaches maximum transfer rate.
Due to the True-X system and the fact that this is not a CAV but is actually a P-CAV,
or partial constant angular velocity drive, those seven beams can read much more of the
inner and outer sections of the disc at once.
And the closer it comes to the end of the disc, the slower the disc spins, resulting
in fewer revolutions per minute but increased data transfer speeds.
In short, this thing is awesome!
The results continue to impress when it comes to burst rate, showing the maximum burst of
file transfer speed at 1784 kilobytes per second on the 56 speed drive, while the 72
speed attains a whopping 9184 kilobytes per second.
When it’s hitting on all cylinders so to speak, this True-X drive is over fives times
faster than the next-fastest CD-ROM drives.
That is ridiculous, talk about living up to the hype.
Intriguingly though when it comes to things like seek time, CPU usage, and spin up and
spin down stats, the 56 speed drive is overall a bit quicker and more efficient.
Not by much, it’s certainly nothing I’d notice in normal everyday usage, but there it is.
It’s worth pointing out the 56 speed drive I’m using is actually a few years newer
than the Kenwood, made in 2002, so perhaps its own internal processing is a little better.
Oh and I also wanted to test its ability to rip audio CDs to MP3s, although since now
I know it has the latest firmware I expect it’ll do just fine.
And sure enough it does, ripping to 320kbps files with ease at around 3 megabytes per second.
Finally, there’s the CD-RW situation, and well even with the new firmware it still wasn’t
able to read my rewritable discs.
Granted, this isn’t terribly uncommon for drives from 1999 or thereabouts.
Even the 56 speed drive had problems although
it did get there eventually, more than the TrueX could say.
Still, that’s a small price to pay for such an objectively faster drive like this, and
I’m half-tempted to keep it in this PC all the time.
I don’t know how reliable it is with continued usage, I’ve only used this one for about a dozen hours.
And as I mentioned earlier I had to go through a couple of these to get one that worked.
But when it is working, it’s just amazing in every way!
[noisily grinds open again]
Well okay, maybe not that way, but everything else! What a beast.
And if you enjoyed this look at this fantastically quick CD-ROM drive then perhaps you'd like
to look at some of my other stuff, which covers topics as diverse as quicker things and slower things.
I don't know man, I just cover hardware and software and stuff.
It’s what I do here on LGR, new videos every week.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!