The design of this drive is easy to recognize. If you see it once, you will never forget it. This is mostly due to the false panel of the tray made of transparent pale-blue plastic. The symbols on the panel are mirrored on the inner surface creating a certain doubling effect. The rest of the front panel is made of common white plastic.

 Under the tray there is a narrow and long eject button and one status LED. You will not be able to listen to music via headphones, as there is no audio socket. At the backside there is nothing outstanding: power and interface connectors, analog and digital outputs, and pins with a jumper that sets work mode.

The drive works via the traditional ATAPI (E-IDE) interface with a maximum data throughput of 33MB/s. The device is equipped with a rather large buffer – 8MB. This solution ensures stable and fast data transfer from the drive. Two technologies, Power-Burn and Lossless Linking, are used to provide high-quality and safe data burning. The first technology works with CD-R and CD-RW disks, the second one is enabled when burning variable bit-rate (VBR) video onto DVD+RW media. If the writing is done at a constant bit-rate, it can be halted and then resumes from time to time. This may lead to data-links losses, and such disk won’t work in DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. Lossless Linking helps to avoid this and even allows replacing any 32KB data block with a new one without losing data links.

The drive supports the whole list of disk types, associated with modern CD-ROMs, as well as the both DVD standards. It can read ordinary compact disks at up to 32x speed in constant angular velocity mode, audio CDs – at 4x speed, with track extraction time of up to 32x. DVD-ROM disks are read at up to 8x speed, DVD-Video, DVD-R and DVD-RW – at 2x; DVD+R and DVD+RW – at 2.4x.

Burning time varies more: the drive burns DVD+R and DVD+RW at 2.4x, DVD-R at 4x, DVD-RW at 2x. CD-R disks can be burned at up to 24x speed in constant linear velocity zone mode. CD-RW disks can be burned at two speeds: 10x or 4x.

As you see from these numbers, the device is no record-breaker in speed if we compare it to some best specimens of CD-ROM, CD-RW or DVD-ROM drives. But the main advantage of Sony DRU-500A is its versatility, but not extraordinary speed parameters. Taking this into account, we could say that the specified speeds are quite adequate to their purpose.

The access time is 200ms for DVD and 160ms for CD disks. This is no exceptional time, but again we don’t wait for anything outstanding here.

Now, let’s say a few words about the retail version of the drive. The package covered by extensive technical info holds the drive itself and a number of accessories: mounting screws, an UDMA/33 cable, “quick start” software guide, “quick start” drive guide, user’s manual, warranty card, a blank DVD-RW disk, and a CD with the software bundle.