The purpose of CDBENCH is to measure the performance of a CD-ROM drive and to save these measurements to a file. This benchmark is designed to treat a CD-ROM drive, its interface adapter (installed in a PC running MS-DOS) MSCDEX and the manufacturers device driver as an integrated sub-system. The benchmark tests the performance of this sub-system, the characteristics of the host PC should have no effect on the results.
CDBENCH is intended to give as clear a picture of CD-ROM drive performance as possible, to be comparable to the manufacturers claimed performance data and to be easily understood by the end user.
It does not try to simulate real world use as PCBENCH and the Windows Benchmarks do. CDBENCH is a specifically a sub-system test, simulation would only make sense if the CD-ROM drive were to be tested as an embedded part of a total system. In addition as CD-ROM is a read-only medium it is not possible to easily control and globally replicate the test data contents, neither are there a clearly identifiable group of commonly used applications to provide use profile data on which simulated application benchmarks could be based.
The software is not tied to any specific CD-ROM title, it will produce results with any ISO 9660 disc although for consistency it is recommended that the same disc title be used within any group of tests.
