X-bit labs

Six DVD Burners Roundup (page 10)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 06/24/2004 | 08:22 AM ]

Nero Burning Rom

The drive’s real speed on different media types may differ in a certain range. In order to determine the real characteristics of the drives we used the popular Nero Burning Rom program. We burned an image file of DVD Video, created with ClonDVD. The time it took to perform this operation was measured with two media, DVD+RW Fujifilm 1-4x and DVD+R Verbatim 8x. We performed writing at the maximum possible speed, which corresponded to the specified one.

As you see in the table, all the drives form a dense group working with a DVD+RW disc, although the TEAC DV-W58G may be considered a winner. The ASUS DRW-0402P/D model is an exception here as it can work at 2.4x speed only, but not at 4x as the other drives.

The same TEAC DV-W58G spends the least time to burn the DVD+R blank. The ASUS DRW-0402P/D outperforms the Sony DW-U14A in their category (4x burn speed).

KProbe

Writing information onto the medium is the main concern of the tested drives, but sometimes there arise compatibility issues: a disc written by one drive cannot be read by another drive, fully or partially. This often occurs because of the low quality of the media. The KProbe utility will help us determine the BLER (Block Error Rate) parameter of CD-R and CD+R blanks written during our tests in CloneCD and Nero Burning Rom. BLER is the measure of data blocks per second with recognizable errors. This parameter reflects the overall quality of the disc – the smaller BLER, the better. I’d like to note, though, that this is only a measure of the number of errors, but no indication of how many of them will become critical during the reading of the disc.

The KProbe utility only works with LITE-ON’s devices, so we took the Sony DW-U18A as a reference point.

• ASUS DRW-0402P/D (Graph)
• ASUS DRW-0804P (Graph)
• Pioneer DVR-107D (Graph)
• Sony DW-U14A (Graph)
• Sony DW-U18A (Graph)
• TEAC DV-W58G (Graph)

First, let’s deal with CD-RW discs. The results in the table say that the Sony DW-U18A committed the fewest errors, among which we are most concerned about C2 errors. The TEAC DV-W58G and the Pioneer DVR-107D took the second and third places, respectively. The ASUS DRW-0402P/D leaves a gloomy impression in this test.

• ASUS DRW-0402P/D (Graph)
• ASUS DRW-0804P (Graph)
• Pioneer DVR-107D (Graph)
• Sony DW-U14A (Graph)
• Sony DW-U18A (Graph)
• TEAC DV-W58G (Graph)

Now, about the DVD+R media. There’s deciphering to the diagram: Parity Inner and Parity Outer parameters reflect the number of random errors recognized in the media. According to the ECMA 337 standard, the maximum number of PI errors in each eight sequential ECC blocks before correction cannot exceed 280 for DVD+R/RW discs. Each ECC block contains 208 rows where the last 16 rows contain the PI data. Any row with one erroneous byte is considered a PI error in an ECC block. Thus, a simple computation gives out the maximum possible number of PI errors per ECC block – 208, or 1664 errors for eight sequential blocks, which would make the disc practically unreadable. Cutting it short, if the number of errors in a disc doesn’t exceed 280 PI during the tests, this disc is considered good. More errors may cause problems at reading. The PO errors parameter is the number of errors after correction of PI errors. The ECMA 337 standard says that a row in an ECC block with over 5 wrong bytes is PI-uncorrectable. The same standard states that no ECC block can have more than 4 PI-uncorrectable rows.

Our testing suggests that the Sony DW-U14A was much worse than the other drives as concerns the quality of writing the medium. It made more errors than the total of the remaining devices. The ASUS DRW-0804P burned a disc with the best quality.