Sony DRU-540A: Sony's Answer to the 12x Call

Introduction

Sony Electronics is one of the biggest names in all forms of technology having to do with home theater, personal audio and video, as well as personal computing. It has a reputation for producing outstanding products that keep up with current standards and technologies as well as designing their own standards and technologies to compete with the rest of the big industry names in all fields.

One type of product Sony has made a permanent mark in is optical media. It has produced everything from simple CD readers to the latest dual layer DVD writers. Besides keeping up with up and coming technologies Sony consistently works to improve products which are already on the market.

Dual mode burners have been out for a while and have been improving both in quality and speed. Recently we received a sample of Sony's new 12x DVD+/-RW burner, the DRU-540A. Though not the first 12x drive released to the world we believed it would be a great competitor due to Sony's reputation. The first 12x capable DVD+/-RW was Plextor's PX-712A capable of writing DVD+R discs at 12x speeds. The second 12x burner we looked at was MSI's DR12A.

So how will this new 12x burner perform compared to the other two? We know you can't wait so we have run a few benchmarks with various types of media to compare reading and writing performance across all. Take a look at what we found...