TEAC DV-W58G

The last drive included into this review again comes from LITE-ON (the LDW-811S model), although ships under the TEAC brand. Again, the case is short in length, which allows avoiding problem during its installation into small system cases. The design of the drive makes it memorable among other devices of the class due to the name of the firm, written on the tray in blue. Under the tray there are an eject button and a LED and a headphones socket with a volume control. The usual power and interface connectors, analog and digital audio outputs and a jumper are all found at the back side of the case.

Being in fact a product of LITE-ON, the TEAC DV-W58G supports SMART BURN, SMART-X and VAS technologies, mentioned above.

The OEM version of the TEAC DV-W58G comes without any accessories for $115.

Testbed and Methods

We made use of the following software to check out the operational characteristics of the drives:

• Nero CD-DVD Speed 2.20;
• Nero Info Tool 2.11;
• Nero CD DAE version 0.4B;
• Nero Burning Rom 6.3.1.6;
• Nic Wilson DVDINFOPro version 2.28;
• Andre Wiethoff Exact Audio Copy (EAC) version 0.95 prebeta 5;
• SlySoft CloneCD version 4.3.2.2;
• Elaborate Byte Clone DVD version 2.0.8.3;
• Karr & Jonice Kprobe version 2.1.0;
• Ziff Davis Media CD WinBench 99.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel Bonanza D875PBZ mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 15GB HDD;
• GeForce2 MX400 graphics card, 64MB memory;
• 256MB DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9.0b installed.

The drives were attached to the second IDE channel as “Master” during our tests.