Fall 2004 DVDR Roundup: Dual Layer and 16X DVD+R
by Anand Shimpi & Virginia Lee on November 1, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Write Tests (cont'd)
The DVR-108D, ND-3500A, and the GSA-4160B couldn't make it to the 8x mark as did most of the other drives. Though Ritek is one of the higher quality media like MCC, those drives still had some trouble working at the media's rated write speeds. The DDW-163 performed the best with the R03 media at 10.20X speeds while BenQ's DW1620 could not write to the disc at all.
Sony's DRU-710A and BenQ's DW1620 were the only drives capable of writing to MCC 004 media at 16x speeds using the CAV write method. All other drives were either not capable of handling this media at the full 16x speed or choked on it from the beginning. The GSA-4160B made it to 14X but couldn't hold it until the end of the write and the 108D topped out at 12X with its Z-CLV method of writing.
With the 16x Ritek media Nu Tech's DDW-163 was the only drive that would cooperate and push the speeds to 16x. All other drives either burned the 16x media at 4X or could not write to it at all. Ritek is not the largest MID available, but we were a little surprised to see so few burners actually capable of proper write descriptors. New firmware revisions will fix this issue in our other burners, but for the time being we were slightly dissapointed.
The only drives that burned coasters with dual layer media were Sony's DRU-710A and MSI's DR16-B. The rest all burned the dual layer media at around 2.4X while the DVR-108D and ND-3500A burned at about 4X speeds.
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Operandi - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
For future reference if you are going to bother taking pictures of the drives take a picture of somthing useful, the drive bezel. nobody cares what the circut board PCB looks like.xsilver - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
Also is there somewhere where I can find tests on reading regular dvd-9 movies? my liton 16x reader goes completely ape when there is any scratches on the disc, the 106d is much slower but plugs through.This is when using dvd decrypter
and who the hell uses cd's anymore? dvd's are so much cheaper per m/b to store data.... if someone doesn't have at least a dvd reader, I say quit trying to buy that l33t AMD64 / 6800 and get something useful!
PuravSanghani - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
The bitsetting feature on this model is very limited with the current firmware in that only DVD+R DL media will be autoset to the DVD-ROM booktype.KristopherKubicki - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
>Also the 108d is the same price as the 3500a where I am.... would it be recommended then?I would still recommend the NEC-3500A. The faster CD writing is worth it.
Kristopher
xsilver - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
Can the bitsetting option on the pioneer 108d be explained more? what will it auto set to?I have a 106d I want to upgrade and have found the pioneer to be much better than something like a liteon....
Also the 108d is the same price as the 3500a where I am.... would it be recommended then?