Conclusion

Although this test session produced expectable results in general, I still found a few curious things. In fact, the MSI DR16-B2 is a slightly perfected version of the DR16 or the BenQ DW1620 models, but these two drives behave a little differently at real work. The BenQ wins some of the tests, but the MSI is better in the others. It’s hard to tell which one is the overall winner, but the BenQ seems to have a high overall score and better functionality. On the other hand, this review was about the new MSI drive rather than about how it compares with the BenQ DW1620, so below you will see a brief summary of its good and bad points (I don’t mention the lack of blank DVD discs in the package and the not very informative LED indicator among the lows of the device since these are just minor imperfections).

Highs:

• Low price
• Good burn quality with most optical disc formats
• Quiet operation
• Good error-correcting capabilities
• Nice-looking design of the front panel

Lows:

• Worse burn quality with some optical disc formats
• Big read and write offsets
• High seek time
• Unable to copy protected discs