DVD Media Burn Quality

We used the following media for our tests:

• DVD+R Verbatim Advanced AZO (Mitsubishi Chemical, MID: MCC 004 (000))
• DVD-R Verbatim Advanced AZO (Mitsubishi Chemical, MID: MCC 02RG20)
• DVD+RW Verbatim DataLifePlus (MID: MKM A02 (000))
• DVD-RW Verbatim DataLifePlus (MID: MCC 01RW4X)

The following table lists how much time it took the drive to burn each disc:

DVD-R: The ASUS SDRW-0804P-D burns DVD-R discs at 4x speed in about the same time as internal IDE devices do, the difference being no more than 1 minute. The gap becomes bigger at 8x speed. It is 5 minutes, which is quite a lot. You may take a guess at the cause of this difference if you recall the tests with CD-R and CD-RW media, but I’ll talk about it later on.

DVD+R: Like with the DVD-R format, the ASUS drive is comparable to “desktop” drives at 4x, but at 8x speed the difference amounts to 4-5 minutes. Of course, this difference is due to the employed burn algorithm, but we’ll talk about it later.

DVD-RW: There are no surprises here. There is a difference at both 2x and 4x if we compare the ASUS with desktop drives, but this difference is not more than 1 minute. Internal IDE drives may differ as much among themselves, too.

DVD+RW: Like with DVD-RW, we have a typical burn session time here.

Now let’s examine the quality of DVD media this drive produces. Write-once formats come first.

Single-Write (Non-Rewritable) Media

 
Burn quality of the DVD+R discs at 4x

The drive had no problems during the burn process; there were no fluctuations or slumps in speed. We can see a couple of curious things, though. First, the diagram shows clearly that notebook drives of the last generation support Running OPC when recording DVD media. Second, the ASUS doesn’t follow the tradition again and uses a two-step Z-CLV burn algorithm instead of the typically employed CLV. The length of the first step is small, however, and the drive is close to CLV-using models as concerns the duration of the burn session.

The quality of the resulting disc is very high. This total of PI errors (13,797) would be good even for desktop drives, not to mention mobile ones. The average rate of PI errors is not higher than 5, with single spikes of no more than 8-9 errors. The rate of PI failures doesn’t exceed 2.

 
Beta/Jitter (left) and TA Test - Outer (right)

The Beta graph isn’t exactly ideal at the part of the disc where the drive hasn’t accelerated to 4x speed yet: you can see separate “steps” indicating the drive’s searching for the optimal laser power. The Jitter rate isn’t uniform there, either, but as soon as the drive hits 4x speed, both parameters become normal and blameless.

The results of the TA Test agree as to the high quality of the recorded disc. Jitter is low; the only problem is the Peak Shift value: the average length of pits and lengths doesn’t match the standard. The drive makes the pits shorter than they should be, so the lands turn to be a little longer than necessary.

On the whole, the drive produces discs of high quality at 4x speed.