Testbed and Methods

So, we now use four optical drives in our tests. These are all considered good burners among the users:

• LG GSA-4163B
• NEC ND-3520A
• Pioneer DVR-109
• Plextor PX-712A

The basic characteristics of the drives and the versions of their firmware are present on the screenshot:

 
LG GSA-4163B

 
NEC ND-3520A

 
Pioneer DVR-109

 
Plextor PX-712A

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the Pioneer drive that supports 16x burn speed .This limited the scope of our test session somewhat.

Since we check out the quality of the media in the first place (with the same utilities we have used before) and only then the burn quality of the optical drives, we have to employ a reference drive which is the same Lite-On SOHW-1653S with firmware CS09. It is going to act as a kind of referee. In case you don’t know or have forgotten, the scanning of the surface of a disc can be done without problems in drives on MediaTek chipsets. Success is not guaranteed in other cases.

We use two test utilities for getting the most objective results and meet the demands of our readers. During the tests we recorded MPEG4 movies on the media and added a few extra files to fill the capacity of the disc as fully as possible.

The configuration of our computer was like follows:

• Intel Bonanza D875PBZ mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB;
• GeForce2 MX400 64MB graphics card;
• 512MB DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9.0b.

We attached the optical drives to the second IDE channel as “Master”.

The following software was used in the tests:

• Nero Burning ROM version 6.6.0.8
• Nero CD-DVD Speed 3.80
• Nero Info Tool version 3.01
• DVD Identifier 3.6.2
• DVDinfo Pro 3.54
• KProbe 2 version 2.4.2

The DVD-RW/+RW discs were recorded at the maximum speed they are rated for by their manufacturers. If this information was unavailable, we determined it practically, finding the maximum possible speed. The DVD+R/-R media were also recorded at a speed twice lower than the maximum they supported. The subsequent scanning of the written discs was performed at a constant speed of 4x.