Holiday Shopping Roundup: Eight Dual Format Recordable DVD Drives
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 11, 2003 10:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Plextor 708A
Currently, the Plextor 708A is “the” drive to beat. We had one of the first samples of this drive back in September and we were thoroughly impressed. Since we did a full review on the drive once before, we won't spend too much time beating around the bush here. Due to a newer firmware release (1.03), we will be running all of the benchmarks on the unit again.Quickly, we will try to sum up some of the features of the Plextor 708A. Feel free to check out the full review from September if you would like a more indepth analysis. The bundled media with the drive is just average — a demo of Dantz Retrospect, Roxio DVDMax, Easy CD & DVD Creator and one DVD+R. (Compare this to Nu Tech's DDW-081, which comes with the entire SonicDVD suite). We found the documentation with the drive to be excellent. The 60-page manual is a clear indication that Plextor had ample time to prepare and QA this unit during production.
| Plextor 708A DVD-/+R Drive | |
| Interface | IDE |
| CD Write Speed | 40X, 32X, 24X (CAV) 16X, 12X, 8X, 4X (CLV) |
| CD Rewrite Speed | 24X, 16X (CAV) 12X, 8X, 4X (CLV) |
| CD Read Speed | 40X Max (CAV) |
| DVD-R Write Speed | 4X, 2X, 1X (CLV) |
| DVD-RW Rewrite Speed | 2X, 1X (CLV) |
| DVD+R Write Speed | 8X (Z-CLV) 4X, 2X (CLV) |
| DVD+RW Rewrite Speed | 4X, 2.4X (CLV) |
| DVD Read Speed | 12X (CAV) |
| Supported Modes | DAO / DAO-RAW 16 & 96 TAO SAO / SAO 16 & 96 Packet Write Multi-Session |
| Supported Formats | DVD+R (DAO, incremental, seq) DVD+RW (random) DVD-R (DAO, incremental, seq) DVD-RW (random) CD-R, CD-RW, CD-ROM, CD-DA, CD-ROM XA, Mixed Mode, CD Extra Photo CD, CD Text, Bootable CD, UDF |
| Access Time | CD: 130ms DVD: 180ms |
| Buffer | 2MB |
Not only does the drive boast 8X writing speed for DVD+R, but it also claims 12X DVD read speeds. As far as specifications go, this drive outperforms the Nu Tech DDW-081 with dual write capability. The access time is a little too high for DVD's, but we will get more into that later during the rest of the roundup.
We should also mention that we were very impressed with Plextor's PowerRec II technology. Even though all of the burners we are looking at today have some on-the-fly laser optimization, PowerRec II is probably the most promising.
The Plextor 708A uses the LC897490 chipset, which is identical to the chipset in the Sony DRU-530A. It will be interesting to see which drive has a more capable mechanical solution.
Unfortunately, our reigning champion is not perfect. Obviously, the DVD Access time is a little high, bitsetting is not (officially) supported and there have been quite a few reports of poor DVD-R compatibility. We have determined that the burner has no default strategies for cheaper media. Some of the media we bought online simply does not work with this burner (the cheap stuff; some disks we tried didn't even have MIDs!). On the other hand, the cheapest DVD+Rs that we could find burned quite well in this burner. We have always been impressed that the 708A sees 4X available write descriptors for 1X and 2X rated DVD+Rs. Does the 708A have enough to hold onto the crown against its most formidable competitor yet, Sony?
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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