Quality Check

We carried out a special “quality” test in order to check how well the tested combo-drives can read the disks with physically damaged or scratched surface. For this test we used a printed CD-disk with scratched surface. Notwithstanding the scratches, LG GCC-4320B drive read it all up, although at an average speed. We would also like to point out two more models: Samsung SM-348B, which showed the minimum amount of errors, and Toshiba SD-R1312, which performed this test with the biggest number of errors.

Overburning Test

This benchmark checks if the drive can write more info onto the media than their official capacity allows. We ran this test for three CD-R disks with the official storage capacity of 700MB. They were: Memorex (8x nominal write speed), TDK d-view 48x and Fujitsu 48x.

As you see from the table, Samsung SM-348B and LG GCC-4320B have the highest “overburning” potential of all. These drives could reach the maximum of 99:57.74 on two disks. Other drives showed pretty average, standard results: they all can burn extra 2-3 minutes, not more.

Advanced DAE Quality Test

This detailed test checks the drive’s ability to extract successfully soundtracks from audio disks. The test worked with a CD-R disk specially created by CD Speed for this purpose. All models, except Toshiba SD-R1202, hit the 100% mark. The South Korean drives were the fastest and most accurate: their offset parameter was minimal. It was very interesting, but the fastest drives turned to be less efficient for on-the-fly copying. Most drives were not able to read up Lead-in and Lead-out data, but could read CD Text and Subchannel data.

The only exception, Philips PBC03210G, could read Lead-in, but failed to do the trick with CD Text. There is no evident favorite in this test, although the South Korean trio looks preferable.

Nero CD DAE

The program for ripping audio tracks and converting them to WAV-files only had problems with the Toshiba drives. SD-R1202 made a lot of mistakes. SD-R1312 failed only five times – it is not too bad, but other drives didn’t fail at all.