X-bit labs

MSI DR16-B2 DVD±RW Dual Layer Burner: Repeated Success or New Heights? (page 5)

Category: Storage

by Vasily Melnik

[ 09/27/2005 | 09:43 PM ]

Performance during CD-R Burning

Verbatim Datalife 52x blanks (Moser Baer India, MID: 97m17s06f) were used for this test.

And once again we have almost identical results. Both devices take about the same time to produce a recorded disc; there is no big difference between them at any of the burn speeds. Well, it takes the manufacturer “improving” the burn algorithms for any difference to arise between two optical drives that have identical speed formulas.

Let’s now see how the new model from MSI reads the disc it recorded at the maximum speed.

40x Speed

The result is perfect – the graph is straight, without any slumps. The drive even surpasses its own specification, nearly achieving 42x speed instead of the declared 40x at the end of the disc. The BenQ passes this test in the same manner, though. There’s no difference between them so far. Maybe we will see it in other tests?

Yes, we’ve got some dissimilarity here. Firstly, the MSI drive’s average seek time is 5 milliseconds better than its opponent’s. Secondly, the BenQ DW1620 is much better in terms of ergonomics – it is only second to the Sony DRU-530A in the disc recognition time parameter. The MSI drive performed worse in that subtest. Save for these two instances, however, the difference between the two drives is negligible.

Well, let’s move on now. We’ve seen how the MSI DR16-B2 works with CDs, so the next step is to check it with CD-R media.

It would be impossible to guess which diagram belongs to which drive if there were no labels, so similar they are. The fluctuations of the graphs indicate that both devices use WOPC and BLER OPC technologies. So, they wrote the blank discs in the same manner, but what about the quality of these discs?

Curiously, the number of C1 errors is almost identical in both cases, the BenQ enjoying a small advantage of having 121 errors less. The manner in which those errors are distributed along the surface differs greatly between the two discs, though. The errors are evenly distributed on the disc recorded by the BenQ DW1620, excepting a small surge on the innermost tracks. The MSI also has a surge of errors at the beginning of the disc, but this surge is almost two times higher than on the BenQ’s disc and longer. So, even though the discs are similar in quality, the BenQ’s one is better. C2 errors are missing on both discs (if you disregard the single C2 error on the disc recorded by the MSI drive).

The Beta graph, on the contrary, is straighter for the disc from the MSI DR16-B2 – the Beta graph for the BenQ’s disc has a small swelling on the innermost tracks. The MSI drive seems to have made a mistake when it began to burn the disc at a smaller laser power than the BenQ and this resulted in the surge of C1 errors at the beginning of the blank which we have seen above. So, the BenQ seems to perform the Optimal Power Calibration (OPC) procedure better than the MSI DR16-B2 in this particular case. The Jitter parameter is slightly better on the disc produced by the MSI drive.

So, both optical drives gave out high-quality discs. The disc recorded by BenQ’s model has somewhat better parameters, but the difference between the two devices is in fact negligible.

Now, let’s try 24x burn speed.