Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 11, 2003 10:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
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 |
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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