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

Where are the good SATA burners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you can find some, but they're not avaiable in the same specs the high end PATA versions. Are they that difficult to make? Because it seems like this would be a good way to at least get the enthusiasts buying new drives. I'd like to make my next computer purely SATA based.

Re:Where are the good SATA burners?

[klui]

I feel SATA drives are good because you don't have to worry about a master/slave drive setup where one drive may hog the bus, whether it's another optical or hard disk. I don't think many companies make them and I'd rather get something like the NEC 4550/3550 or Pioneer 110(D). You can always get an adaptor but that would drive up the cost, sometimes 100+% of what the drive costs.

Re:Where are the good SATA burners?

[Stan Vassilev]

Well I honestly do not see benefit of SATA just yet, besides it has neater cables and no master/slave annoyance.

It'll be more useful in future with flash-RAM cached HDD's, which will be able to send out data from time to time at speeds that make sense to be SATA.

If ain't broken, don't fix it. Many motherboards have SATA, but buggy implementation. Also SATA isn't much faster than PATA right now. It's still on the PCI bus for most motherboards, while to make full use of its speed it has to be on a separate bus for its own usage (which will happen with future implementations).

This reminds me of a buddy who was absolutely sure that ATA 133 disks are faster than ATA 100. Thing is neither of them fills that bandwidth in actual usage, so it trully and entirely doesn't matter.

Re:Where are the good SATA burners?

[Crilen007]

http://plextor.com/english/support/PX-716SA%20moth erboard%20compatability%20listing.htm Others support it. (seems like plextor doesnt support firefox though)

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

[ppz003]

That's what I can't understand about these types of reviews. So what if one drive can write faster than any other if I lose the data a couple years before the other drives' outputs. Maybe people who back up data constantly for a living might be concerned with the speed, but for my money, I'll burn as slow as needed to achieve a consistantly readable disk.

This review would be much more interesting if they showed some quality data with each burner.

Re:Some Advice

[1000StonedMonkeys]

By media compatibility, I mean how well the drive does on different brands of media. This varies greatly between drives, and is one of the most important pieces of information you can have to get the most out of your drive.

Re:Some Advice

[ppz003]

The burning speeds listed are just the maximum possible speeds for each type of media. What the gp was trying to say is how does each burner work with the different chemical types of each media. Not all DVD-R's are alike.

Re:Some Advice

[undeadly]

This review would be much more interesting if they showed some quality data with each burner.

Optical storage reviews at www.cdrinfo.com does this.

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.

Re:It's the print version

[1000StonedMonkeys]

Yeah, nothing says good internet neighbor like bypassing a site's advertising when linking on a high traffic site....

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Dual Layer

[mysqlrocks]

And we weren't even able to find anybody to sell us dual-layer DVD-Rs!

Wow, really? Where did they look?
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=dual-layer+DVD -R

ALL about DvD

[earthstar]

On a related note, http://www.dvddemystified.com/ has all the info about DvD's on its DvD FAQ http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html.

Also see my journal about Nero 7 DvD burning probs.In short ,stick with Nero Version 6.X

Re:What's the physical difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Track width tolerance. The faster the disc spins, the more it matters.

Did they use the same media for all their testing?

[mmell]

After all, I've seen huge differences for both CD-R and DVD+R performance caused by using different brands of media. I've even had outright failures while using Maxcel brand media (ymmv, that's just my experience).

In the CD-RW and DVD-RW arena, I'll be slower to judge as I haven't seen the same kind of variances; then again, once I've purchased RW media, I don't need to purchase more so I haven't seen a wide variety of brands in this area. I suspect that a similar situation exists.

I haven't even touched DL-R or DL-RW yet - the media costs are prohibitive. Who wants to pay 8-10x as much per platter for a medium which only delivers around 1.8x the data density?

In the end, I'm not too sure I care so much about write times (hey, I can spare a few extra seconds when I burn a DVD or CD - it's not like I do so for a living), so much as data reliability, medium durability, media cost and compatibility.

Bottom line - while the drive is important, it's nothing without the media; so long as the drive functions correctly, it seems likely that there's more to be gained by selecting the proper media for use in the drive.

Strange things...

[yuretz]

I've noticed that strange things happen with storage technology. First we had 5.25" floppies. I used the same 5.25" floppies for months and had no troubles with bad sectors and unreadable files. Than 3.5" appeared and we have just realized that old-style floppies are not reliable and loosing data due to disk error is really easy. 3.5" disk was hard to damage and could be used for months or even years. After that, the era of CDs/CD-R/CD-RW began. Diskettes again appeared very unreliable. At some moment, I've realized that I'm not sure that I'll be able to read data written on the floppy I bought yesterday! But, CD-R or CD-RW seemed everlasting and very, very, very reliable storage medium. There was no such thing like unreadable CD. The CD drive speeds was growing, but the quality and reliability was going down! Now we have DVD era, and when I burn a CD with my CD-RW, I always check that the data was written correctly and can be read. Sometimes, I have even to burn a disk two times to be absolutely sure. Probably the DVD storage medium will have the same fate. Will it ever end?

Re:Strange things...

[klui]

Stop using cheap (rather than inexpensive, but good) media. Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim are good brands.

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...

Re:cheap != good

[Shanep]

I recently switched backup media to DVD+R from -R, and upgraded the Pioneer's firmware, and put them both on USB 2.0 instead of FireWire, and they both work well now. Something about the Pioneer and my cheapo USB + FireWire cages was resulting in complete FireWire bus hangs.

There is a USB2/Firewire chipset (Prolific PL-3507) which is just downright broken. The A revision is not flash upgradable without desoldering the chip and the subsequent revisions are flashable, however the "fixed" firmware is pretty much still broken. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of PL-3507 based USB2/Firewire units out there and it seems they are single handedly taking some shine of the perceived quality of IDE-Firewire enclosures. I wonder if that is what you had?

The PL-3507 insists on using a fixed firewire ID, so you can't have more than one on a chain. Why anyone would want more than ZERO PL-3507's is beyond me however.

I use a Lite-On DVDRW drive in an older Iomega USB2 CDRW cage to burn DVDR's on my Mac mini within Tiger. The "Iomega" CDRW drive I pulled out of it was actually a Lite-On LTR-5226S drive, with the Lite-On sticker on the top and the Iomega branded black faceplate. ; )

Re:cheap = good

[Shanep]

> Lite-ON

This post is hilarious for so many reasons.

Ugh! Dell uses them in computers, and some models have a near 100% failure rate!

Bullshit. No model of ANYTHING that has a "100% failure rate" will remain available for long.

Do some research before recommending garbage like that.

Anyone who did research Lite-On quality, will find most people have very good things to say about them.

As an example, in the last batch of 480 computers we bought from Dell, we've replaced almost 600 Lite-On DVD/CDR drives. That's more than 1 per computer.

Did you try upgrading the firmware yourselves (to a real Lite-On firmware) or just get the Dell morons to replace the drives with the same drives with same potentially broken firmware? I have had terrible trouble with Dell in the past too, but that was trouble with DELL. I call complete and utter bullshit on this post.

The only reason we haven't replaced more than that is that we've started replacing the drives with Sony's that we pay for out of our pocket rather than using the Dell 3 year on-site warranty we paid a lot of money for.

Ahhh, here's an education for you then... Sony CDRW drives are made by... wait for it... Lite-On. Oh, and they are not made to Sony specification or design, they are Lite-On designed and built, with slightly modified firmware to pretend to be a Sony, complete with Sony top sticker and Sony faceplate. I'm not sure how many Sony DVDRW drives are made by Lite-On, but I beleive I have seen at least one laptop Sony DVDRW drive with, oddly enough, a Lite-On sticker on top.

Dell doesn't give a damn about their customers, so they continue to screw us over by continuing to use those pitiful drives, so we had to pay for our own drives out of our pocket.

Yes, Dell sucks. Lite-On however, do not churn out "pitiful drives". This I can state with absolute certainty and authority. They may have made some less than fantastic models, but I don't know of any. The general drive quality coming out of Lite-On is top notch. Which is why MANY VERY VERY BIG brand names are confident in letting Lite-On make "thier" drives.

The truth, is probably that Dell modified the Lite-On OEM firmware, as is typical, and fucked it up, as is typical of Dell.