Summer 2005 16x DVDR Roundup

Final Words

What makes a DVDR drive perfect? Well, for one, it has to be able to write to just about any media that we throw at it and then read it back without a hitch. A perfect write should have no PI/PO(DVDR) or C1/C2(CDR) errors on it when read back with PlexTools.

So, what makes a DVDR drive acceptable, a great deal, better than the rest? The ideal, best drive out of a group should be able to write to high quality media without any problems, and should be able to read back a disc to which it wrote in the first place. It should have no problems reading a disc unless it reports a successful write incorrectly. This is what we saw in our benchmarks today. There were a few drives like the Toshiba SD-R5372 and LG GSA-4163B that could write a disc "successfully", but not read it back with its own laser.

Half of these drives failed to even see Ritek brand RW media, which cannot be caused by a bad batch of media. Sony's DRU-720A wrote to them perfectly, but even its disc had a good number of PI errors. We were really dissapointed in the NEC ND-3540A's performance when compared to drives like the BenQ DW1640, but hopefully their performance will improve as their BIOS matures.

The only drive we saw that could write to the majority of discs and quickly at that was BenQ's DW1640. It had average performance on most of the benchmarks. but always had a successful read to go with the successful write. The only disc that it could not write to was the MKM A03 8x DVD+RW.

Besides that single issue, the DW1640 has features to aid in successful writes, as well as bitsetting features to allow greater compatibility of the media to which it writes. The bitsetting utility can be downloaded from BenQ's website. Over these 6 DVDR units, we recommend the BenQ DW1640 for its performance and reliability in writing to various types of media. Expect this drive to start showing up on retail store shelves very soon.

Special thanks to BenQ for supplying us with the DW1640.
Special thanks to Sony for supplying us with the DRU-720A.
Special thanks to Marken Communications for supplying us with Verbatim brand test media.
Special thanks to Antarra Communications for supplying us with Ridata brand test media.