Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives

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