Performance during CD-RW Media Processing

Now I’m going to test the LG GSA-4160B with rewritable media.

The older model is quicker in this test, but I don’t consider the difference of 6-10 seconds as a big one. But burning is not only about the time the drive takes to produce a written disc but, and more importantly, about the quality of this disc. Let’s examine it, then!

 
 
Burning/reading the CD-RW 24x disc:
LG GSA-4163 (left) and LG GSA-4160B (right)

The program wrongly identified the burn algorithm employed by the GSA-4160: it says CLV while the drive actually uses Z-CLV. But it’s all right with the GSA-4163. The burn session was completed successfully – the graphs are straight and clear, without any jaggedness. The burned discs were read without errors. Yet you can see the “exclusive” vibration of speed here, again.

 
 
Quality of the 24x CD-RW disc burning:
by LG GSA-4163 (left) and by LG GSA-4160B (right)

The new model wins another test! It has five times less C1 errors and no C2 errors at all (well, the GSA-4160 produced no C2 errors, either). The results of the new model are impressive, especially considering the type of the medium: the BLER is low, save for a minor surge at the outermost tracks. This surge never goes beyond 50-60 and that’s quite allowable even for CD-R, not to mention CD-RW discs. The asymmetry of the disc written by the GSA-4163 still rests on the zero mark – there’s no trace of the transition to the higher speed as in the graph of the GSA-4160. The jitter of the disc produced by the new model is better, too, with a minor surge when the drive switches the burn speed. So, the LG GSA-4163 seems much better than the previous model in this test. Let’s see what we have with 32x CD-RWs.