Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives

Name: Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives
Item: Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives
Author: Kristopher Kubicki

by Kristopher Kubicki on December 11, 2003 10:54 PM EST

Posted in
Storage

41 Comments | Add A Comment

41 Comments

Burn Tests CDR Media

For our burn tests, we conducted a battery of burn and simulation tests using Nero DVD/CD Speed and NicSoft DVD Info Pro. Special thanks to Nic for providing us with lots of support during our roundup (Nic, as you may know, wrote the Nu Tech/QSI bitsetting utility). Our test bed has slightly changed since our last set of benchmarks, so any new media that we test will have slightly different (hopefully better) performance.

We used the following configuration to test our burners:

Albatron 865PE Pro II
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz 800FSB
2 x 512 DDR OCZ PC3200 EL
Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM 8MB IDE
Windows XP SP1

Some of the media used in this analysis.

What better way to spend a weekend than by burning random data on hundreds of dollars worth of media? If you would like to see the DVD Info Pro Media Information for the discs used in this roundup, feel free to download the text file. Note: Not all of the media in the text document was used in the final benchmark.

Below, you can see how each burner faired on various types of media. The computer had no processes open other than Nero while we were burning the media. We will start with CDR media first. Higher burn speed averages are better. You may download our entire burn time spreadsheet.

Ritek 97m31s01f — 52X CDR
Drive	Average Burn	Length	Mode
ASUS DRW-0402P/D	15.97X	74:43.00	CLV
Gigabyte GO-W0404A	30.23X	74:43.00	CAV
LiteOn LDW-411S	30.22X	74:43.00	CAV
MSI DR4-A	21.04X	74:43.00	Z-CLV
NEC 1300A	16.00X	74:43.00	CLV
Nu Tech DDW-081	29.87X	74:43.00	CAV
Plextor 708A	33.33X	74:43.00	P-CAV
Sony DRU-530A	29.28X	74:43.00	P-CAV

Mitsubishi 97m23s24f — 24X CDRW
Drive	Average Burn	Length	Mode
ASUS DRW-0402P/D	8.36X	74:43.00	CLV
Gigabyte GO-W0404A	23.44X	74:43.00	P-CAV
LiteOn LDW-411S	23.43X	74:43.00	P-CAV
MSI DR4-A	10.04X	74:43.00	CLV
NEC 1300A	10.00X	74:43.00	CLV
Nu Tech DDW-081	9.94X	74:43.00	CLV
Plextor 708A	23.78X	74:43.00	P-CAV
Sony DRU-530A	23.31X	74:43.00	P-CAV

Tech Support Burn Tests DVD+R Media

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rms - Saturday, December 13, 2003 - link
Why was there no identification/information on the physical drive used in these products? I'm disappointed.

rms
artifex - Saturday, December 13, 2003 - link
Have you noticed that if you rip the ISO with DVDD, you need to burn it with that? I had trouble reading a DVD that I burned using Nero, but when I went back to DVDD for the burn it worked fine.
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, December 13, 2003 - link
I use K3B and DVDTools for linux as well. Nero is good, depends on what you end up doing with it though. For ISOs and GIs, DVD Decryptor and Alcohol 120% are my particular choice of poisons.

Cheers,

Kristopher
sprockkets - Saturday, December 13, 2003 - link
Haha, for some stupid reason that Sonic Software that came with my Lite On DVD+RW only drive said a new disc was already full or something stupid. Used nero from my other drive and works fine. Nero rocks, of course, under linux with SuSE and K3B and DVDtools it works fine too. Burns for me took around 13.5 min.
KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Belzer, I emailed Nic about it. I was in fact using 2.24

Kristopher
artifex - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Hmmm turns out my drive is identical to the BTC 1004IM. What can I say? I don't see any drives using that base in the comparison either, though I hardly feel prejudiced against, like the Lite-On people :)

Anyway, looks like it does what I need it to, even has Mount Rainier support (My RW5125A didn't according to DVDinfoPro), for 1/2 the Plextor or Sony, so I should live with it for a while, right? I mean... I'm used to burning DVDs at 2.4x anyway, and now I can use the - formats (yuck, if I have to).
Belzer - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Kristopher: I think the MCC 003 should be identified as 8x in the latest (2.24) version of DVDInfoPro too.
artifex - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Jeez, over $10? They must have a built-in Hollywood tax planned.

I decided I couldn't wait. Fry's had a weird "Emprex" +- brand on sale for $90 before tax here in Dallas. I figure for under $100, I'll not worry about burning it up before Blu-ray... or whatever competes against it.

I'll let you know how it works... so far I see the websites on the box don't have any info on the drive :( It does seem to have a reasonably complete set of software, though. If nothing else, I can use it a little while and exchange it.
KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Belzer: Youre probably right. In DVD Info Pro, I got this (14)

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/roundu...

Looks like the discs are just ahead of their time ;)

Kristopher
Belzer - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Thanks for the update, Kristopher! Sorry if I sounded rude in my last post.

About the Verbatim media:
MCC 001 = 2.4x, MCC 002 = 4x, MCC 003 = 8x

Check Philips' list with approved media:
http://www.licensing.philips.com/services/db/midco...

or check this thread:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=13821

or check Plextor's list of compatible media:
http://www.plextor.com/english/support/media_708Co...

or check for yourself with DVDIdentifier:
http://dvd.identifier.cdfreaks.com/

Verbatim probably hadn't the new 8x box art available yet so my guess is that they put the sample discs they sended to you in an old case.