DVD Writer RoundUp

CodeHog writes "Got socks instead of the new DVD writer you were looking for this holiday season? Tom's Hardware has a writeup on the latest DVD writers and their 'true speeds'. The conclusions may be surprising: higher speeds won't necessarily do any good as media availability continues to be a problem." From the article: "Despite the stagnation of write speeds for DVD-R and DVD+R at 16x, new DVD writers are regularly being marketed, since performance for other types of writing (RW and dual-layer) is still improving. But as is customary, manufacturers of writers have a lead on media manufacturers. For this article, we visited all the stores to see what types of media are actually available for sale, and once again the result was most enlightening. You can find 16x-compatible -R and +R discs, but in the other formats they simply aren't out there."

Comments

Some Advice

[1000StonedMonkeys]

Never trust a DVD writer review that doesn't take into account burn quality and media compatibility. That's how DVD drives differentiate themselves today.

Re:Some Advice

[SuperBanana]

Never trust a DVD writer review that doesn't take into account burn quality and media compatibility.

Ding, thank you. My Plextor external firewire DVD burner, which cost a rather pretty penny, claims to have all sorts of dodads to let it write to virtually everything, even lower quality media. "PowerRec" and some sort of angle adjustment widget, the whole 9 yards. 16x write and so on.

Imagine my surprise when:

• It could burn DVD's at 16x but couldn't burn a CD-R, even the Memorex brand Plextor suggests/includes samples of...at speeds over 8x. And even at 8x, it gets 'hung up' quite a bit. No improvement with several other kinds of media, including HP and Sony...it hangs as soon as it starts writing the lead-in, re-seeking and stopping/starting, eventually returning a "media sense error."
• It can't read disks anywhere near as fast as it can write them. It'll happily write a 16x DVD. Then when I go to read from it, it starts at what sounds like -almost- 16x, but quickly drops down (and no, I don't mean the usual small variations the drive makes compensating for angular velocity.)

Not exactly what I expected from the drive "techies" all seem to recommend, and the premium end of the market (I think the Sony external drive might have been more expensive, but didn't get as good reviews. How ironic.)

The firmware has been updated about 6-7 times, and each time I've obliged. Most of the time, there's some entry about improving "burn strategy" and "media compatibility", but it still can't burn CD's faster than the 4-5 year old drive in my server box.

how about noise?

[escay]

it's about time the decibel level of drives is also looked at - what now with super silent SATA HDs and PSUs, the loudest component turns out to be the DVD drive. currently the user reviews from newegg are all we have for noise levels of the drives...