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An Exhaustive 16X DVD Burner Roundup
CrzyP writes "AnandTech has put together an extensive roundup on eight, count 'em, eight 16X DVD burners capable of writing to dual-layer media. Some of the big names on the list include Pioneer, NEC, LG, Sony, MSI, and more. They explain in detail the current technologies implemented into the newer drives, like bitsetting and error control as well as run their reading/writing benchmarks on 16X and dual-layer media."
Oh well, maybe BenQ will get their DW1650 (16x DVD±R, 8x DVD±RW, 4x DVD+R DL) out by the end of the year.
How long to go 'till we have media-cracking 52X DVD-burning?
We just ordered a bunch of 4X DVD burners here at work. If we buy it, it's obsolete. I guess that's what you get for using computers.
See what I've been reading.
The price of writable DVD's is much too high for me, I think I'll stick with my cheap-o CD-R's for now :D
:P
Still, though, if any of you feel the need to buy me one of those boogers, feel free, I'll give you my shipping address
The decision for me is being swayed towards the NEC just because it has some very nice hacked firmware.
I wonder when the big companies will start catching on that they're not offering enough in their firmware, and sales are being lost due to that.
Newegg seem to have some nice deals on the NEC and Pioneer.
#include <sig.h>
according to the review its at the top of the list... the drive is only about 65-70 bucks and it has very hackable firmware, and I personally (since i own one) have never had any coaster from the drive ... btw.. use Riteks
Well, the media has to come way down and the speed has to go way up. Whats max speed for dual layer drives these days, 2.4?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22i+loved+9%2F11
Pardon my ignorance...
What do you get from hacked firmware on a burner?
overburn type stuff?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
sick.
Its not like a dual-layer burner is that much more than a normal one, assuming you don't already have a DVD burner. The one I had was only about $10 more for the dual-layer capability, so I figured, why not?
If dual-layer blanks were about a buck or less, I'd still buy a dual-layer drive. At the worst I'd burn when I was sleeping or at work.
The ability to make an exact back-up of my DVDs would be worth the length of time it took to burn them.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
OK, I looked through all the drives, and their features are largely identicle. But why is it that not a single one supports Mt. Reiner? I've NEVER seen a DVD(+/-)R(W) drive that supports it. Can someone tell me why?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Where are the SATA drives! Finding them to buy is difficult enough, finding decent reviews of them on today's comparison-shopping-infested Web is next to impossible. :(
Yeah, but I already have a 4X Sony burner I'm happy with, so there is no point in buying a new one.
I hope that by the time dual layer blanks are cheap 4x or even 8x dual layer burners will be available.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
More FUD!
64k, etc., just crap that obviously involved no forward-thinking.
Here in Canada, CDR's cost about 45 cents apiece for 700 megs.
DVD-Rs cost about 80-130 cents apiece.
- For a CD-R, you're paying 6.5 cents per 100 megs
- For a DVD-R you're paying between 1.8 to 2.9 cents per 100 megs.
Any way you put it, DVD-Rs are WAY cheaper than CD-Rs. Since I got my DVD burner last summer, I've burned around 50 DVD-Rs. The spindle was around 75 dollars, taxes included. For the same capacity, I would've needed more than three 100-disc CDR spindles. Those generally go for 50$ each, taxes included. In all I've saved about 75$ right there. That's half of what I paid for my burner. Another spindle, and it'll have paid for itself...
I would have liked to have seen how the Plextor drives performed and the use of Taiyo Yuden media as this is what I would use for high quality burning.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
The cpu/workstation setup is critical to buring reliably at 12x t 16x which I do all the time
4
/
I use a dual 2800mp workstation,a tyan 2466-2m mobo, 2 gigs of DDR 2100,, a 128 mb visiontek card ($373 and the bees-knees 2 years ago), a 64 bit MegaRAID SCSI 320 2 ch HBA with 128 mb on board, and 4 seagate 15000 rpm U-320 36 gb drives running raid 5.
I run 2 partions on the raid 5 drive, each with windows 2000.
The 1st partion is for normal everyday use; and has all the normal crap on the drive.
The 2nd partition is for burning dvd's quickly.
Problem is all those programs you install and run sometimes have lots of crap running in the background. The way around that is a very simple OS setup; so that nothing runs except what you need.
In my case I use a program from www.litepc.com to modify the windows 2000 setup, so that I can eliminate lots of junk Bill Gates says has to be installed; like internet Exploder. Suffice it to say that by turning off WFP then uninstalling the parts of the OS you dont want, then re-enabling WFP you get a slim rock solid and very fast OS setup.
I use a pioneer dvr-108, which has been flashed with the latest and greatest firmware from links found at www.cdfreaks.com pioneer device forum
they link to:
http://pioneerdvd.rpc1.org
look for the correct firmware for your dvd device, in my case for the dvr-108 it was the file;
DVR-108 v1.14 - RPC-1 + 12xRip + nx4all
using the flash program DVRFlash 2.0 from this forum
http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=1075
as you'll see they have a lot of other firmware available. Look through the forum, and search for results on your device; then follow the instructions.
A list of media is here:
The following 8X media can be burnt faster than the rated speed
MCC003 \
MCC02RG20 \
RICOHJPNR02 ---- These can be burnt at 12X
RITEKG05 / These were 100 stack for 40.50
TYG02
CMC MAG. E01 \
YUDEN000T02 / These can be burnt at 16X
MCC003 is Verbatim Datalife Plus DVD+R 8X
MCC02RG20 is Verbatim Datalife Plus DVD-R 8X
RICOHJPNR02 is RiTEK eXCELLENCE 8X DVD+R
RITEKG05 is PioDATA 8X MULTISPEED SUPER GRADE A (silver top, no other markings)
TYG02 is JVC DVD-R 8X
CMC MAG. E01 is Shintaro 8X DVD+R
YUDEN000T02 is "That's DVD+R for premium inspection 8X"
Now the HOW-TO:
I have used xcopy Platinum, but until I flashed my DVR 108 to this firmware it was non-functional with a dual layer burner. So I sometimes use this as well.
I have used DVD FAB, but found it didn't work everytime.
I currently use DVD Shrink 3.2 (freeware). However you'll find that if your I/O (ie HDD system is too slow) is slow, DVD Shrink will throttle you down to the rate the data is delivered at. If this happens, uninstall it, then delete the folder, then reinstall. The use of the firmware allows the display in Nero to show from 1x to 16x. Same in DVD Shrink. Normally you dont get these choices, if the media does not support them.
So for me it was a case of having the trial and error. However a combination of the above allows me to burn the ritek g-05 media at 12x or 16x all the time. In dvd shrink, it takes 18 minutes to encode and burn a backup of any 4.5 + gb dvd-video project..ahem..
Since this workstayion will install windows 2000 or xp pro in something like 8 min 25 secs, I'm sure that has a lot to do with the encoding rate, which truly blazes along.
Hope that helps,if you want to burn at 12 to 16x?? Other than that just direct everyone to the forums,
as the truth is out there...
If it makes you feel any better, I was burning CD's in 1990 when the media was $50 a pop at one point due to a shortage :).
Give it time, it will go down...
The pain in the ass at the moment is the absolute crap shoot of knowing which DVD players will read DVD+/R DL.
I'm still trying to get my 8X to burn at 4X. I'm at my third stack of media (all from different manufacturers) and all I can do is 2.4X. Only coasters at 4X (except for Maxell media which I ran out of early on).
One thing that I've always found missing is information on whether drm is embedded in the firmware, something that Sony, among others has been caught doing in the past. Whether the drm is functional from the beginning, or is designed to be turned on later through an update patch or possibly a Microsoft update (as is suspected in the Sony case), would be good information to differentiate as well.
Just add a checkmark, or code number for whether it contains drm'd firmare, and the number can signify which one, which can be explained in a footnote.
This info is going to get more and more important going forward, as drm continues to infest every layer of computing.
hear hear
OK, so these look like nifty desktop drives. How about for us wee laptop folk? Is there a particular excellent USB2/Firewire external DVD burner? How about one of the recommended drives from the article and one of the cheap Internal/External kits I've seen floating around?
As per the article, the Pioneer DVR-108 can burn DLs at about 4x. Still way to expensive for media, I'd tend towards double sided discs if I really needed the higher density.
Hmmm, those PlexTools for detecting errors are very interesting.
Is there open source software that does something similar? Does Anybody know.
badness 10000
To date myself, I remember when the cost of a CD burner finally went under a thousand dollars. At the time I thought it was a GREAT price.
Heck, I remember when 16 megs of RAM cost $600! When it got down to 200 bucks I bought it. My old 133MHz Pentium had 32 megs and screamed!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Do you mean the price of a computer that can handle burning at 16X? Striping across 15k rpm drives is what's too expensive for me
I second that, although the mods appear not to.
I have one of these (can't remember the model number) and it is excellent -- maybe not in terms of speed (which isn't a critical factor in my use) but in its support for DVD-RAM. Now I can record DVD-RAMs on my video recorder and read them on my PC. DVD-RAM is also a nice backup medium for a small system.
They reviewed the LG, which is the only other drive I know of that has similar support. I'm not sure if LG will accept DVD-RAM media in cartridges, as the Panasonic does. That is a drawback if they can't.
It would be nice if they had included a Panasonic drive so it could be compared side-by-side with the LG.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
I have a drive capable of writing DVD:s as well as CD:s. Thing is, I never do anymore. I have never actually tried to write a DVD (the media is pretty expensive), and the only time I've written a CD lately was for Fedora 2 when it appeared, and the Ubuntu install CD. Similarily, I hardly ever read CD:s or DVD:s anymore either.
For backup I have an external USB2 HDD, as well as mirroring essential work data between my available machines at work. For media, well, the external HD is 200Gb, which I have yet to fill after a year - and when I do I'll just get a second one. It's quite a bit cheaper than buying reliable CD blanks anyway.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Wow, that's great news. I guess I should have actually read the article.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Try accessing Slashdot from Anti-Slash sometime - they check the HTTP referrers. Since I've been there, I've NEVER had mod points again.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Lessee...eight...16x...that makes this a review of, what, 128 burners, according to the MPAA?
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
The one I used in 1990 was a Sony system that I was told cost $25K. That might have included the Compaq 486 that we hooked it up to (can't remember the speed at the moment).
:).
/s" as input and would generate .bat files as output. It sure beat doing it by hand.
The device was actually two boxes, both the size of two old full size CD players (a little taller than a 2U rackmounted server these days, but more square from a depth perspective). One of the boxes was an "encoder" and the other box was the one that actually did the writing (it had the tray).
The software was EXTEMELY archaic. You had all of these "virtual image" commands from the DOS prompt. When you created a directory, you had to say how large it was (in terms of kilobytes, not files). We figured out some basic formulae that worked pretty well for those values.
The user manual to the system was a complete joke. It was the worst translation job I had ever seen. We used to highlite sentences in it and challenge people to decrypt their meaning
I spent quite a bit of time making AWK scripts that would take the output of a "dir
Back then, we also would put signs up outside the lab room asking people not to run and walk softly, etc. We'd turn off all fans etc. in the room for fear of vibration damage. When media was that expensive, coasters really sucked!
I must be psychic/psychotic.
I had always been told that Sony was the best by friends. I had been debating one to replace my nice yet newly slow Pacific Digital 4x dual-format burner which I got for $23. (Side note: Older, cheap DVD burners will be hot Christmas gifts this year.)
Just today, about 2:30PM, I was looking at new dual-layer drives. I had a crazy scheme (younger brothers, 11, 10, and 8) would like a cd burner for Christmas. I'll do one better - I'll give them a barely used DVD-burner which costs less than a new CD-RW almost anywhere.
I look at new egg, I want one to match my case a bit, and I see the NEC ND3500-A. It looks nice, so I get it, seeing that it had some good reviews and was pretty cheap.
I accidentally got, debatably, the best 16x, dual-layer DVD burner out there.
I'm sorry, all I can say right now is woohoo!
Oops, my mistake, I can also say YeeHaw!
So, if DVD burners are so cheap, why are DVD recorders, those used to replace the aging VHS, so expensive? If you can get a DVD player for $50, lets assume we replace the DVD unit with a burner, wouldn't the price for a DVD recorder be around $120 instead of the $300 they sell now? Surely its not the software for recording that is so expensive...
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Dual-Layer media allows you to copy video DVD's without recompressing the video etc. This allows a perfect copy of a video DVD.
The only trick then is finding players that play the media. It seems completely random. I have a fairly new cheap DVD player that can't handle DVD+R DL, but a friend has a 3 year old player that plays them fine.
Hah! I reckon this has happened to me! How childish. :(
Why can't we all just get along?
My panasonic "superdrive" from newegg that I installed came with a DVD-RAM disk. The disk is a 4.7 GB disc, not in a caddy like they used to be. The package says you can read and write like a floppy, unlike DVD-RW which (AFAIK) needs the disc to be closed before reading on another PC. This format seems better than DVD-RW for data, why didn't it catch on? Too little too late?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I find it odd that the graphs only compare the average write speed, which doesn't take into account the time for writing lead-in/lead-out, which can vary greatly between drives. The info is there in the write test pics, but nowhere easily comparable. Plus they're obsessed with 16x burns when it's been shown that 12x burns almost always average faster because the drive spends less time adjusting speed.
Bleh. When will Toast come out of the dark ages and support even half of the advanced features that burners can do these days?
Image-on-media? Kinda dumb, but no, can't do it. Media compatibility check? Nope. Report on confidence of burn success? Nope. Accurate time estimation? Nope. Statistics on disk readability? Phbt, dream on.
I will say this- Toast used to be the best burning program around, PC or Mac. Now, it's quite clearly been eclipsed. In fact, nothing on the Macintosh platform comes close in terms of support for advanced features on todays' drives.
Please help metamoderate.
I always wondered, why dont we spin the laser? or have multiple laser heads so we can read more data at the same time?
To be blunt, Anandtech should stick to reviewing CPUs. In my experience, reviews of optical drives by those who don't specialize in them (such as Anandtech or Tom's) tend to be very poor. They look at the wrong things (put emphasis on things that are not important and not put emphasis on things that are) and their testing methods are not always accurate.
h p?t=18064
For example, there are many who feel that the BenQ is actually a very excellent drive. The active OPC produces *better* results (not worse, as the reviewer thinks). Though slightly slower, it has the ability to overspeed media (burn 8x media at 16x, for example) with excellent quality. It also doesn't help that the review used a very outdated firmware for the BenQ review.
And to answer another question that someone had, none of these firmwares have DRM.
A better place for reviews:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/
And a review of this Anandtech review:
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p
The installation of (most) Operating sytems is disk based, not so much CPU based. So your encoding rate is likely not tied to well to how fast you can install Windows.
:) ) ...
/path/to/image/image.name
... lots of crap running in the background... detracts from the performance, so why run a graphical environment when one isn't needed? Heck I (or several others here) could whip you up a dialog based text/curses interface in short order to present you with your images and select which to burn. Then you'd just run that as your login shell and be done with it. You'd mount your root (and image) filesystem(s) as read-only and be quite secure and stable. In the event of a power outage or hardware failure the only thing lost would be the disc that was being burned.
... hmmmm ...
At the risk of sounding like a Linux Zealot (not that I am not one of course
If you are going to have a second OS just for burning the image to the disc, you could save yourself a great deal of headache by installing a small Linux partition on there instead.
You could even install X with a minimal window manager such as Blackbox or fluxbox, and only the minimal x-bsed cd/dvd burning tools. Or even smaller, just use the command line tools such as
cdrecord dev=/dev/dvd speed=16
(no that isn't a typo; cdrecord burns dvd as well)
That could (depending on OS chosen) be less hassle then setting up and trimming the fat from a Windows2k install, and take up a lot less space (say sigificantly less than 100MB if you went the text route -- a binary gentoo should do that easily enough) (and possibly time).
Just make a small partition for the Linux install, a small swap partition, and make a large Fat32 partition if you want Linux to modify images, or a large NTFS partition if all it'll do is read the images.
As you say:
Heck, this could even be done on a "live" cdrom. Then you could duplicate this on multiple machines just by booting from cdrom. Or if your motherboard supported it, stick it on a memory card or other persistent solid state memory device and boot from there.
This type of setup is in fact one of the areas Linux quite excels: as a small dedicated purpose machine.
Maybe someone should make bootable cdroms for this
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
"My upgrades have actually remained SCSI, but it is becoming harder and harder to find SCSI drives that are excellent and reasonably priced."
Like SCSI DVD Burners. I think the closest viable alternative is firewire with the additional benifit of a much thinner cable.
lameness fitler sux
Actually, 1 DVD speed is pretty exactly equals to nine (9) CD speeds in data transfer rate and three (3) CD speeds in linear/rotational speed. IOW - you get 3x data speed from the same rotational speed. So - 16x DVD speed is 48x CD physical speed and we know how CDs start exploding at that (or a tad higher). OTOH - I read that DVDs are physically more robust (2 plastic layers instead of 1 for instance) but I wouldn't trust that. Also - 16x is about 22 megs/second (at max of course). I guess many users still don't have HDDs capable of providing that when translated to file system speed. I find 8x DVDs to be the sweet spot still - fast and _quiet_(!). Awaiting for cheap dual layer media.
I thought we'd killed RAM!
A 2way format war is bad enough - don't keep bringing the third one back from the dead.
Zombie format wars. Not pretty.
(Seriously - DVD-RAM is making an undeserved comeback. This is less than pleasant when your chip probably can't support the format)
If *plastic* disks are going to be limiting the technology, why dont we use something a little stronger?
DVDs are already layered construction on top and bottom polycarbonate with bits between, it shouldnt be too hard to put in a fiberglass, carbon-fiber, carbon-nanotube, transparent aluminium/aluminum, reinforcing layer into the manufacturing process.
Yes it might cost some more, but a lot of things are described as "cheep arse plastic". Why should CD/DVDs be any different?
What I really would like to see is a feature that checks the quality of the recording while burning.
I own a Nec ND2500-A and although this is one of the better DVD-Recorders it once in a while produces coasters - and I only use quality media.
You won't recognize this beforehand, you try to read the DVD's back and recognize that your data is lost due to read errors.
This is _very_ annoying and I still found no solution to this.
So to anyone who uses DVDs for backups: Use a burner that supports readout of PI/PO errors and check every DVD you burned afterwards. At least I have not found a better solution to check if you are burning coasters.
There are actually very good reasons to limit movie playback to 2x. See, movie playback is intrinsically 1x. Going any faster is a waste. And by going more slowly you can prevent the start-stop behaviour, move more slowly across scratches and do any manner of tricks to ensure better quality of playback.
The main reason manufacturers put a movie speed limit in the firmware is not to frustrate people trying to copy a movie, nor better error correction, but rather to keep the drive quiet while watching one. Reading at 16x makes a horrendous noise, making a movie pretty intolerable, while 2x is pretty silent. What is actually 'locked' AFAICT is the rotational speed - so even with rip lock on, you will go from 2x at the start up to near 4x towards the end of the disc.
I agree that this should be user selectable, however (e.g. without a firmware hack, using something like DriveSpeed).
will probably upgrade to a dual layer soon... being able to buy the top rated burner for under $70 is pretty amazing... unfortunately $70 will only get you about 2 dual layer dvdr's... looks like burner prices won't be the deciding factor in when i upgrade.
All the torrents you could want.
funniest site ive ever been to
You can buy a Liteon 1213 drive, and re-flash it into a dual-layer capable, 16x burner. Using Liteon's notorious tool, Kprobe, the actual burn quality is improved, resulting in a disk which can be read back faster in an ordinary dvd reader. IN OTHER WORDS, if you have a 1213S, it's in your own best interest (in terms of burned disk quality) to upgrade the drive into a 1633S.
For years, Liteon has been well known for it's products being upgradable to the next model. You could buy a 401S (a basic 4x DVD-R burner), and upgrade it to a 811S (an 8x DVD-R/DVD+R burner). Or in this case, the 1213S can be made into a 1633S, with just a simple firmware flash.
More details here, here, and here.
it is amazing to see that prices have come down so much that you can now get a top of the line dvd burner for under $100
Get your torrents...
I couldn't help to ask... What do you guys think about the relative reliability of (current) DVD blanks in order to use them as a cheap substitute for low-end DAT (DDS) tapes?
Yes, sites like CDRLabs, cdfreaks and CDRinfo should have better technical reviews. However, Anand has a shootout of several drives which makes it easy to compare them.
I haven't read the enitre article, but I've given up on Sony and PLextor drives since they don't (at least the last time I checked) all you to set the booktype when writing DVD+R/RW media to DVD-ROM. This is important for backwards compatiblility with older DVD players and even the xbox. If you give some of these players a DVD+R disc, it won't read/play it. Take the same media, set the booktype to DVD-ROM and the most of the players will then play/read the data you have written to the disc.
The Lite-ON and NEC drives (with hacked firmware) allow you to set the booktype. I think BenQ allows it as well, but I can't confirm that since I don't have any BenQ DVD burners.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Anyone?
I need more space on a single disc more than I need a faster burner. Kinda expensive to back up a 160GB HDD with 4.7GB discs.
I can only write DVD-R up to 4X, DVD+R are 8X. Still I am having trouble with every type of media.
Go post your flamebait somewhere else you fucking loser. Bush won. Get over it. By the way, if you want to blame someone for the death of our soliders, wake the fuck up and realize that the terrorists killed them.