DVD Burning Quality

Verbatim DataLifePlus discs (manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemical and Taiyo Yuden) were used for the tests. Let’s first see how much time it takes to burn a blank.

DVD-R: The previous model refused to burn DVD-R discs at 4x speed. As for the GSA-4163, it did burn a DVD-R at 4x but only in Nero Burning ROM. When I tried to burn one in Nero CD Speed, the minimal speed the drive would agree upon was 8x. So, I can’t say the drive has got rid of its oddities – they are just changed in the new model. At 8x speed the new drive is 12 seconds faster than the older one, but this difference is insignificant with the absolute speeds being something like 7-8 minutes.

DVD+R: Like with the “minus” format, the previous model refused to work at 4x or 8x, choosing the intermediate speed of 6x. The new model also wouldn’t work at 4x or 8x in Nero CD Speed. However, I did burn DVD+R discs at 4x and 8x speeds using Nero Burning ROM. So, we’ve got a kind of incompatibility of LG’s drives with Nero CD Speed. The new model could also write an 8x medium at 16x speed, which the GSA-4160 couldn’t repeat. So, we can only compare the speeds of the drives at 12x only where the new model is slightly (27 seconds) ahead of its predecessor. That’s a small but noticeable gap.

DVD+RW: The drives have almost identical speeds when burning discs of this format. The difference amounts to only several seconds.

DVD-RW: Again, the drives take almost the same time to burn a blank of this format at the maximum speed. The previous model refused to burn a disc at 2x, while the GSA-4163 performed this task successfully, turning in an average time.