We are proceeding to examining the drive itself.

The drive looks cute in its stylish silvery case. The front panel of the device is silvery, too, with a nickel-colored Eject button. The controls and indicators are the same as you would expect to find on an optical drive.

ASUS has always been original about designing its external optical drives. For example, the SCB series models were shaped like a compact-disc case. The SDRW-0804P-D model follows this theme: there is a depression on the cover of the case which repeats the outline of the compact-disc. What’s nice, this solution is not only aesthetical, but functional, too. It is handy to put a disc there temporarily. The new design looks attractively overall.

The following can be found on the drive’s rear panel: a Power On/Off lever, a power connector (the design of this connector is similar to the charger connector on Nokia’s cell phones; it is reliable and prevents the plug from falling out of the connector at work), and two interface connectors. Unlike many other external drives, this model is equipped not only with USB 2.0, but also with a FireWire interface to give you more connection flexibility. At least, Mac users shouldn’t feel neglected.

The drive uses ASUS’s traditional technologies FlextraLink (buffer underrun protection) and FlextraSpeed (the drive automatically chooses optimal laser power and burn speed), but technologies that reduce noise and vibration (DDSS II and AFFM) are not implemented due to the design specifics of the new model. Instead, the user receives the Optical Pickup Head LCT function which improves burn quality with misbalanced media or media with an uneven surface.

Basic technical characteristics of the drive:

• CD-R burn speed: 24x
• CD-RW burn speed: 24x
• DVD burn speed:
  • 8x (DVD+R)
  • 4x (DVD+RW)
  • 8x (DVD-R)
  • 4x (DVD-RW)
  • 2.4x (DVD+R DL)
• DVD reading:
  • 8x Max CAV (DVD-ROM Single Layer)
  • 8x Max CAV (DVD-ROM Double Layer)
  • 8x Max (DVD-R/+R)
  • 8x Max (DVD-RW/+RW)
• CD-ROM reading: 24x Max
• Supported CD formats: CD-ROM, CD-ROM XA, CD-DA, CD-Extra, Photo CD, Video CD, CD-I, Photo CD, Video CD, CD-Text, CD-R, CD-RW
• Supported DVD formats: DVD-ROM, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD+R DL, DVD-RAM
• Supported CD burn modes: Disc At Once, Track At Once, Session At Once, Packet Writing
• Supported DVD-R/RW burn modes: Disc At Once, Incremental Recording, Restricted Overwriting
• Supported DVD+R/RW burn modes: Sequential Write
• Supported DVD-R/RW burn modes: Restricted Overwriting
• Buffer: 2 megabytes

Despite the tiny size, the SDRW-0804P-D has up-to-date characteristics. It supports almost all existing optical disc formats, including DVD+R DL. The relatively low write-once speeds are due to the design of the drive as well as to the interfaces employed.

I think I can finish the descriptive part of the review here. Just take a look at the information Nero InfoTool and DVDInfo report about the drive and we can proceed to our tests.