Performance during CD-R Media Burning

We used Verbatim Datalife 52x blanks for this test (Moser Baer India, MID: 97m17s06f).

It took almost 6 minutes to burn a blank at 24x, which is the maximum burn speed available with the ASUS drive. Desktop drives normally perform this task in about 4 minutes. Of course, there is an explanation of such a behavior of the ASUS drive, but I’ll offer it below when I will talk about the quality of the recorded discs. When the burn speed is lowered to 16x, the duration of the burn session grows up by 27 seconds only. It means the SDRW-0804P-D is still worse than desktop drives at 16x, but not as much as at 24x.

And now let’s see how the drive reads the disc it has recorded at the maximum (24x) speed:

Reading the CD-R disc burned at 24x

The disc is read without problems: the graph is straight and clear, without any fluctuations or slowdowns. The maximum speed as declared by the manufacturer is successfully achieved. This is an indirect indication of high quality of the recorded disc. And the quality check is the next thing I’m going to do.

CD-R disc burning at 24x speed

So, you can see now why the new drive from ASUS is much slower than internal IDE drives at writing CD-Rs at 24x speed: it just uses a four-step Z-CLV algorithm, while IDE drives use either P-CAV or single-step Z-CLV. Otherwise, the burn process was completed without problems.

 
Burn quality of the CD-R disc at 24x

Despite the high density of the first encoder errors, the average BLER is no higher than 10 which is itself an indication of a very high quality of the disc. The total number of C1 errors is rather high (21,442), but the average (10) and maximum (20) BLER is good anyway. There are two minor surges of C2 errors, but I’m inclined to regard them as defects of the blank rather than errors of the drive. All in all, the results are very satisfactory, especially as we deal with a portable drive with all the consequences.

The Beta/Jitter graphs are another confirmation of the high quality of the disc: the Beta graph is an ideally straight horizontal line going at the zero mark and the Jitter rate is uniform along the surface of the disc, too.

Next goes the disc recorded at 16x speed.

CD-R disc burning at 16x speed

You can see that the ASUS uses a two-step Z-CLV algorithm at 16x speed, while internal IDE drives usually employ the classic CLV. It explains the difference of about one minute in the burn session duration between them. Otherwise, the ASUS recorded the CD-R without problems. But what about quality?

 
Burn quality of the CD-R disc at 16x

That’s an admirable performance! The total number of C1 errors has diminished from 21,442 to 14,511. The average BLER is about 5-6, and the maximum level of BLER is about 15, if we don’t count in the single spikes that reach 20. Second encoder errors are missing altogether. The Beta graph is still an ideally horizontal line lying at the zero mark, and the uniformity of Jitter is good, like in the previous test. As you can see, the quality of the disc improves noticeably at the reduced burn speed.

Summing up the results of the ASUS SDRW-0804P-D with recordable CDs, I should acknowledge it performs well at both maximum and the reduced burn speed. Yes, some models (not many, though) of internal optical drives burn CD-Rs a little better, but we should keep it in mind that we’re talking about a portable drive with a weaker optical section.