Nero DiscSpeed is a benchmarking software solution designed to help you find out the real abilities of your CD-ROM or DVD drive, conducting a series of tests to reveal CPU usage and transfer rate.

Of course, there are many more tests included in the package, such as seek times, burst rate, DAE quality, spinup and spindown time, load and eject times.

The user has the option to either perform them individually or all at the same time, in which case Nero DiscSpeed will need more time, around 10 minutes, to complete the tests.

You don’t have to be a guru to learn how to use Nero DiscSpeed, but you will need to know some geek language to be able to understand the results. Just as always, there is a lot of information online, so in case you’re in trouble with the way Nero DiscSpeed displays the results, just Google them a little bit.

As for the app per se, it works pretty impressive and we must admit that we were a bit surprised during our test. Although this kind of program isn’t quite a must have, it could pretty much become one since it can tell you whether a disc will give you errors or not when trying to burn a CD.

Not to mention that you will know exactly how fast is your drive, although this might also depend on some other factors, such as the quality of the CD and the amount of data you wish to burn.

But Nero DiscSpeed is undoubtedly one of the best tools in the market and the freeware license that’s included in the package should make it a keeper.