Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 11, 2003 10:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Tech Support
One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb pioneered the original tech support benchmark for motherboards and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.We used three camouflaged email addresses and emailed particularly trivial questions concerning our burners to each vendor. For other tech support that was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (5 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result.
| Average Customer Support Response Time | |
| ASUS | No Response |
| Gigabyte | 38 hours, 12 minutes |
| LiteOn | 41 hours, 20 minutes |
| MSI | No Response |
| NEC | 29 hours, 48 mintues |
| Nu Tech | N/A |
| Plextor | 11 hours, 10 minutes |
| Sony | 6 hours, 44 minutes |
Hands down, Sony had the best technical support. An interactive ticker kept our problem up to date via email. There was also an online interactive help, which we used, and had our problem answered in less than 8 minutes. However, even by using the email ticker, we had our problems answered by an average of 4 hours before the nearest competitor (no surprise, Plextor).
You may be surprised that neither MSI nor ASUS were capable of responding to any of our three questions within 72 hours. However, to give these two some credit, the answers to our questions were found in their knowledge database. Nevertheless, the same could be said for Sony and Plextor. (Looking carefully, Plextor answered our problems right in the manual). Unfortunately, there was not much difference in support between our two $100 burners. We were expecting much better product support from NEC than LiteOn, but our averaged response time on our emails was less than 3 hours apart.
Nu Tech's customer support was lacking by a little. There was no email address, nor number to contact for technical support. Unusually, the general “comments” section required a birth date in order to submit. The site also had problems working under Mozilla. We informed Nu Tech and they are currently working on the problem.
Our customer support response time test did not give Sony or Plextor the leading edge since all our questions were answered incredibly fast via more than one method.
Let's get burning!
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Icewind - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Wait, so in the Avg Write Column in your XLS sheet, thats TIME not The actually speed of the burner itself?Ok, looking at it, the way you have it labeled it looks alot more like the average speed the burner BURNED at, not the actual time.
KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
I apologize if there was a bias away from the LiteOn drive. It was unintentional.PXC, alexruiz: The DD0203 was originally supposed to be in this roundup, but I severed the cable taking it apart to look at the chipset :) It will be in the next roundup.
Kristopher
pxc - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
What's up with the anti-LiteOn bias in the article? It didn't fail any tests like the NEC 1300A did, but it's trashed from first mention and in the conclusion.#15, I can tell you why the DD020x wasn't included: it's junk. I've had one for over a month now and it has the worst media compatibility of any dual format drive. Even the media that generally works will also fail 20% of the time. It would do Optorite no good to have it's buggy drive compared to working drives.
KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
My contacts at Plextor told me dual layer media is going to cost upwards of $10. Ill pass. I am more interested in BluRay anyway.Kristopher
artifex - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
I'd be willing to pay more than double the then DVD+R price for DVD+R dual layer media, assuming that hard drive prices haven't gone down much before then.KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Belzer: Thank you for the feedback. I do appreciate your thoroughness and I have corrected a number of errors.I do digress concerning the MCC 003 Media, however. Not only does DVD Info Pro identify the media as 4X write, but the Verbatim box art also identifies the media as "1-4X".
I have all of the images from CDSpeed, so it looks like i will be spending the rest of my friday uploading them and inserting them into the article. :)
Good to be done with finals ;)
Kristopher
alexruiz - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
A little surprised to find that some other available burners were not included:1) One of the most popular dual burners WAS NOT included (Optorite DD0203/DD0201) Furthermore, there is already available the 8x "+" version (DD0401)
2) Another one is the BTC 1004IM, or the big brother, the 8x 1008IM that is supposed to write DVD-R at 8x also...
Chistpher, can we include the Optorite DD0401 AND the BTC 1008IM for the next review?
Alex
michec - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
When was this review done? The 8X dual-format Lite-On drive is not a drive that is being anticipated - it's already available. I got mine on Nov 30th at a local computer show. Why bother with reviewing 4x drives when there is a 8x version that is available? What a waste of time and energy reviewing the 4x Lite-On.LoneWolf1 - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
In regards to #8. You may download our entire burn time spreadsheet.http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/roundu...
Icewind - Friday, December 12, 2003 - link
Heres a linkhttp://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php?ID=8051