X-bit labs

MSI DR16-B2 DVD±RW Dual Layer Burner: Repeated Success or New Heights? (page 8)

Category: Storage

by Vasily Melnik

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

Performance during Work with CD-RW Media

From write-once CDs we will now proceed to rewritable discs.

The drives take the same time to burn a disc at 24x as well as at 32x burn speed. Well, it is expectable considering the identical speed formulas and the same burn algorithms employed in both devices. Let’s now compare the quality of the resulting discs.

24x Speed

Once again there’s no difference between the two optical drives as concerns the burn process proper.

The MSI drive doesn’t look good against the BenQ DW1620 in this test. It has a high C1 error rate at the beginning of the disc before reaching 24x burn speed, which results in a high total of C1 errors (about 3.5 times more than on the disc produced by the BenQ). This fact may be the indication of an imperfect laser calibration procedure (OPC). The error rate goes down afterwards, but the BenQ DW1620 still has much better results. I should also acknowledge that the BenQ didn’t perform so well in this test earlier, before the release of the version B7T9 firmware. It had a surge of up to 1200 C2 errors at the beginning of the disc. So, this is quite a curious situation: there were two similar imperfections, and one manufacturer corrected them and achieved a highest CD-RW burn quality at 24x speed, while the other manufacturer didn’t do so. Or maybe the MSI developers just couldn’t achieve the same burn quality as BenQ did.

The Beta graphs are overall good in both cases. The MSI’s is even perfect. The BenQ drive, however, got much better results by starting at a lower laser power and increasing it as it achieved 24x burn speed. The Jitter rate isn’t perfect in either case, but fits into the acceptable range.

Next I will check how the drives process CD-RWs at the officially unsupported 32x burn speed.