Performance with CD-RW Media

This section is about how the SDRW-0804P-D handles rewritable CDs. The drive took 5 minutes and 43 seconds to produce a recorded CD-RW disc at 24x burn speed. Internal drives accomplish this in about 3 minutes and a half. So, the ASUS is again considerably slower than desktop optical drives. Let’s check the quality of the resulting disc and see where this slowness comes from.

Burning a CD-R disc at 16x

Just like when burning a CD-R at 24x speed, the drive uses a four-step Z-CLV algorithm here which accounts for the slow burning. But speed is not the main parameter in the process. Let’s better check the quality of the resulting disc.

 
Burn quality of the CD-RW disc at 24x

The results are good overall. The total number of C1 errors is rather high (49,934), but this is a rewritable medium and we shouldn’t be as strict about it as about write-once CDs. The average BLER is no higher than 25, except the outermost tracks of the disc where it goes up to 70. This latter surge isn’t lengthy and will hardly affect the readability of the disc. C2 errors are missing altogether. The Beta graph is almost ideal, like with the CD-R media. Jitter is uniform along the entire disc, except a small stretch on the outermost tracks where there’s the surge of C1 errors.

Thus, the ASUS SDRW-0804P-D processes rewritable CDs well enough. To finish the CD-related section of this review I’m going to evaluate the error correction capabilities of the drive.