Performance during CD-R Burning

I use Verbatim Datalife 52x blanks for this test.

I hadn’t expected any serious discrepancies considering the identical speed formulas of the drives. The BenQ and the LG are very close to each other at each speed, although the GSA-4160 is always a little ahead of its competitor.

Now let’s see how the new BenQ reads the disc it has just written at the maximum (40x) speed.

That’s excellent. The graph is straight, without any fluctuations. The drive even exceeds its own specification, reaching almost to 42x instead of the promised 40x at the end of the disc. By the way, the read graph of the LG drive with the same disc had some jaggies which are not present in the picture above.

The drives behave similarly in this test, too. This concerns both the average read speed and the access time. The results are good overall, especially the access time. Yes, these 100 milliseconds aren’t any record (the best samples of optical drives kept within 90 milliseconds), but the slowest of the drives I’ve reviewed had an access time of 130 milliseconds or even more. The new BenQ surpassed its competitors in the disc recognition test, showing a record-breaking time of 9.4 seconds. There’s only one drive, the Sony DRU-530A, that takes less time to perform this task. The burst rate, 17MB/s, is a little bit surprising. I haven’t long seen products that would do worse than 20MB/s in this test. On the other hand, these numbers don’t actually affect the real performance of the drive and are more of purely theoretical interest.

That’s enough for the speed and time it takes to burn a CD, and we can get to the next step, to the CD-R burning quality.

The drives use different write algorithms at their maximum speeds. The BenQ employs the classic CAV algorithm while the LG uses Z-CLV, a less popular algorithm for this particular operation. The LG’s Z-CLV proved to be a little faster and helped the GSA-4160 to do the burning of the disc 13 seconds ahead of the opponent. The fluctuation in the burn graph of the BenQ DW1620 is due to the above-described Walking OPC and BLER OPC technologies. Now let’s see which drive produced the better-quality disc.

The results of the two devices are very close, again. They both have a low BLER and a total lack of second encoder errors. Still, the LG GSA-4160 is just a step ahead of the opponent as it has fewer C1 errors (11,965 again 20,622). In spite of this difference the disc produced by the BenQ is very good, too. The Beta graphs are almost perfectly flat with both drives, while the Jitter is better with the disc written by the LG GSA-4160.

So, although the new BenQ is inferior to the LG GSA-4160 in the quality of burning CD-R discs at the maximum speed, it still produces discs of a very high quality, and it’s among the best optical drives available.