X-bit labs

AOpen DUW1608/ARR DVD±RW Dual Layer Burner Review (page 5)

Category: Storage

by Vasily Melnik

[ 09/21/2005 | 11:49 PM ]

Performance during CD-RW Discs Burning

In this section I will check the AOpen DUW1608/ARR with rewritable CD media.

The drive is almost one minute slower than other devices of that class at 24x speed: a majority of modern optical drives burn a disc in less than 4 minutes at this speed, but the AOpen took almost 5 minutes. The same can be said about 32x speed – the full burn session time is almost the same as with the best optical drives at 24x speed. It’s easy to guess the reason – the manufacturer must be again experimenting with the burn algorithms. We’ll see shortly which algorithms are in use here.

CD-RW disc burning at 24x

The 4-step Z-CLV burn algorithm leads to the drive’s taking an unusually big amount of time to burn a disc at 24x speed. Well, it pays to wait even for a minute if the resulting quality is high.

Quality of the CD-RW disc burned at 24x speed

Not bad. The total of C1 errors is normal, for a rewritable medium. Moreover, after the first third of the disc (on which the drive seemed to be groping for the optimal laser power) the C1 error rate goes down to below 20, which is a good result even for CD-R media. C2 errors are missing altogether. The Beta graph is an ideal horizontal line. The Jitter rate only fluctuates much at the beginning of the disc where there’s a high level of C1 errors. Overall, the drive passes this test quite successfully, but some other drives produced better results in it. Let’s now see what we have at 32x.

CD-RW disc burning at 32x speed

The use of the same 4-zone Z-CLV burn algorithm leads to the drive’s being slower than other drives that use a P-CAV algorithm or a Z-CLV with fewer zones. As a result, there is no real advantage in time over 24x speed. Otherwise, the burn session went off normally, without any unexpected slowdowns. What about the quality of the resulting disc?

Quality of the CD-RW disc burned at 32x speed

The results are quite typical for a 32x CD-RW disc. All optical drives produced bad or very bad discs at that speed in my tests. This time there’s a peak of errors on the outermost tracks of the disc which includes not only C2, but also CU errors which are unacceptable. I rechecked this with another CD-RW disc and there was a peak of errors again of the same height and at the same spot of the disc. So, I don’t blame the disc, but the drive for that problem.

The Beta graph is normal, but the Jitter rate is fluctuating too wildly throughout the disc. That’s why I don’t recommend you to use 32x speed for burning CD-RWs in this optical drive, especially since this speed doesn’t give you any time gains over 24x speed, but is accompanied with a considerable quality loss.