by Andrey Kuznetcov
09/15/2005 | 01:20 PM
Sony continues to roll out their external optical drives. Not so long ago we managed to get hold of DRX-800UL DVD burner and today we would like to offer you some detailed performance measurements for this baby. If you check our Storage section you may also want to compare the today’s results with the performance and burning quality offered by other solutions from Sony, which we have reviewed earlier.
<%BANNER[article]%>Of course, this article will be or primary interest for those of you who cannot go with a cheaper internal solution for some reason.
I would like to say right away that the Sony burner drive we are going to talk about today is actually none other but a LiteOn SHOW-1693S – the results of typical OEM relationship. Another analog of this device, though design as internal solution is Sony DW-Q28A. Also, note that the exterior looks of our today’s hero is exactly the same as that of the previous model – Sony DRX-720UL.
The exterior design of the retail drive makes it look very attractive. The case is made of light-gray shining plastic. The entire front panel is made of aluminum. The rear part of the casing is slightly narrower than the front. At the top of the drive there is the manufacturer’s name printed in large letters and the sticker next to it indicates the major highlight of the solution: its ability to work with dual-layer DVD-media. There is another sticker with the product barcode and model name on the front panel of the drive. When the drive is idle, its tray is hidden behind the front panel. Once you press the button on the right-hand side of the case, the panel opens and you can access the tray. At the top of the front panel there is a small slit with a status LED. When it lights up green, the drive is powered on, and the red color indicates that it is working with some media at the moment. The drive feels quite heavy and has four small feet made of some rubber-like material with high friction coefficient that is why it sits firmly in place when set horizontally. You can also set it vertically, in this case you will need to use a special vertical stand.
There is a Power On button, a power connector and three interface ports on the back side of the drive case. Two of these interface ports are i.LINK (FireWire) and differ only by the number of pins (4 and 6), and the third port is a more common USB 2.0. The drive is powered via the external power supply unit.
The case doesn’t have any ventilation slits or grids. On the one hand, it is an indisputable advantage, because less dust will get inside through the ventilation holes. But on the other hand, it may result into excessive overheating of the drive during heavy workload and if the environmental temperature is high enough (in summer, for instance).
According to the technical specifications of the drive, it can read DVD discs at 16x speed and CD discs at 48x speed. As for the last parameter, I have to stress that you can only achieve this reading speed if you use Turbo Boost mode. Usually, Sony sets the default CD discs read speed for its drives at 40x. The reasons for that are quite natural, actually: this read speed is more than enough for comfortable work in most cases, and if you want to read CDs at 48x you have to put up with high level of noise and higher drive temperature. If you are ready to sacrifice that for the sake of faster CD read speed, you have to power the drive on, load the disc, and then press and hold the tray control button on the right-hand side of the drive until you see the status LED blink twice. It will take about 5 seconds. Note that you can have your drive read discs at 48x only with CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-DA (DAE) media, while for CD-RW the maximum read speed will be 32x. The same is true for the DVD discs: the maximum DVD read speed of 16x can only be achieved for single-layer DVD+R/-R and DVD+RW/-RW. The DVD-Video and dual-layer DVD+R/-R can be read at the maximum speed of 6x.
The write speed also differs depending on the type of the discs you use. For single-layer DVD-R and DVD+R writing is performed at 16x, and for dual-layer discs of the same type it is limited by 4x. If you use DVD-RW discs the write speed will equal 6x, and in case of DVD+RW discs – 8x. The dual-layer DVD+R discs can be burned at 4x. CD-R discs burning speed is 48x, and for CD-RW this number is 24x. The drive’s buffer is 2MB big.
The drive supports IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0 interfaces. The drive’s burning quality is ensured by Buffer underrun error protection technology. Also, Power Burn innovation contributes to it, too. The DVD discs access time equals 135ms, and for CD discs this number is 140ms. The dimensions of the drive are 52mm x 164mm x 234mm, and it weighs 1.5kg.
The optical burner is bundled with a CD disc with all the necessary software, a PSU with all the corresponding cables (European and USA set), transparent plastic vertical stand, a USB cable, a IEEE 1394 cable, user’s guide and quick installation guide, and a warranty coupon.
The retail price of this solution rests around $145.
To test our optical drive we used the following software tools and utilities:
Our test platform was configured as follows:
The drive was connected to the mainboard USB port. We didn’t have any problem connecting the drive via any of the available interfaces. However, we decided to continue our testing session via the USB 2.0 port, because it is the most widely spread interface in the today’s computer systems. The drive read CD discs at the maximum possible speed of 48x.
As it always happens in case we examine external solutions, we ran a little fewer tests, because Nero CD DAE and Exact Audio Copy utilities didn’t recognize the device as part of the system. We tested the drive “as is”, i.e. just the way any of you will get it from the store.
These two utilities were used to retrieve detailed information about the Sony DRX-800UL drive:
As you can see on the screenshots above, the drive reported that it supported almost all functions typical of this kind of devices. The only missing thing is probably the support of DVD-RAM media, which are not that popular, as I believe.
So, from this standpoint it is really hard to wish anything more than that. Now all we can do is check how efficient all these features are in practice.
According to our well established testing methodology for CD WinBench 99, we use not only a brand name molded CD-ROM disc, but also two copies of this disc made on CD-R and CD-RW media.
Internal transfer graphs for Sony DRX-800UL:
If you look at these graphs, you will easily notice that the drive encountered some problems with reading the final part of the initial test disc.
The diagrams above show a pretty expected result: the maximum performance is achieved in case of a CD-R disc, while the minimum in case of a CD-ROM disc, because of the above mentioned local reading issue. For the same very reason the shortest access time is typical of the CD-R and CD-RW cases.
We used five CD media to perform these tests: a molded CD-ROM enclosed with a computer magazine, 700MB data CD-R and CD-RW discs burned with the Nero CD-DVD Speed itself, a likewise prepared 800MB CD-R, and an Audio CD.
CD-ROM | CD-R | CD-R 800MB | CD-RW | CD-DA | |
Sony DRX-800UL | Graph | Graph | Graph | Graph | Graph |
The CD discs testing didn’t reveal anything completely unexpected. All the features and characteristics claimed by the manufacturer proved absolutely true and functional. We didn’t experience any problems with any of the test discs through the entire test session.
The second group of basic tests was devoted to DVD media. We used six discs to get a full picture: a DVD-ROM with a video movie and its copies made on DVD-R (Digitex), DVD-RW (TDK), DVD+R (Fujifilm), and DVD+RW (Verbatim) discs. We also used a dual-layer DVD+R DL disc from RIDATA with movies in Mgep 4 format.
DVD-ROM | DVD-R | DVD-RW | DVD+R | DVD+RW | DVD+R DL | |
Sony DRX-800UL | Graph | Graph | Graph | Graph | Graph | Graph |
During the DVD media tests we also encountered no problems whatsoever. Our practical tests proved almost all the claimed specifications. The only exception was the access time for the DVD+RW media.
Using the Advanced DAE Quality Test we will determine hardware characteristics of the drive affecting the accuracy and quality of audio copies from CD-DA media. Two special CD-R discs prepared by Nero CD-DVD Speed are used in this test. One audio disc is used as is, i.e. we emulate the situation when the user has a normally working disc. The other disc has physical surface defects, imitating the situation when you are trying to make a copy from a long-used, worn-out audio compact-disc, which cannot be regarded as a high-quality medium any more.
The first screenshot shows what we will get if our disc doesn’t have any severe physical damage of its working surface. As we can see, the results are more than satisfactory. High average speed of audio tracks extraction and 100% quality, these are the obtained results. The offset value is negligible, which should ensure high-precision positioning of the drive over the media surface. And finally, the drive could read all four types of auxiliary service data, which also indicates that we will get high quality audio copies burned by this drive.
The second screenshot show the results obtained for a scratched disc. The numbers indicate that the drive can cope very well even with a low-quality disc. The average audio extraction speed slowed down just a little bit, the number of identified data errors is minimal, and moreover, the total quality score remained 100%. The only weak spot in this case was the “on the fly” copying, which is quite natural in the given testing conditions.
In order to check the drives’ ability to efficiently process errors occurring during the audio ripping process, we resorted to the Advanced DAE Error Correction Test. For this test we used the same physically damaged (scratched) audio CD disc prepared in Nero CD-DVD Speed. The program determines how many C2 errors should be found by the drive and how many errors the drive actually finds. Then the obtained results are used to calculate the C2 Accuracy and Quality Score parameters which reflect the efficiency of the hardware error-correction logic in the optical drive. Unlike the previous test, this one not only tells how many errors occur as the drive is reading an audio CD disc, but also evaluates the drive’s ability to find such errors.
The results you can see on the screenshot above indicate that the hardware error-correction logic of Sony DRX-800UL is quite efficient. The C2 accuracy parameter, which is the most important value for us here, is close to 100%. The Quality score also appeared quite high. All this gives us the right to expect this burner to work fine even with damaged low-quality discs.
We used a few different DVD discs to evaluate the DVD burning quality provided by the Sony DRX-800UL drive. All of them were created with Nero Burning Rom utility at the maximum write speed certified by the manufacturer. The burning quality was tested with our Sony drive. All DVD discs were read at a constant speed of 4x.
As usual, if it is the first optical storage review you are reading on our site, I would like to remind you of the major burning quality evaluation criteria we use.
According to the ECMA standards for DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW media, the total number of PI errors in 8 subsequent ECC blocks should not exceed 280. This is the first reference parameter that we will take into account. Besides, any ECC block should not contain more than four irrecoverable PI errors (an irrecoverable PI error is referred to as PI failure by CD-DVD Speed utility).
Thus, we consider those DVD discs as quality media from the formal standpoint that have no more than 280 PI errors per each 8 ECC blocks and no more than 4 PI failures per single ECC block. Besides the above listed quality evaluation criteria, it also makes a lot of sense to pay due attention to the surface-scan graphs showing at the distribution and type of errors discovered on the disc surface. If all other results are equal, then those cases should be regarded as the most dangerous when the maximum number of errors exceeds the limits over the entire disc surface rather than those cases when the maximum number of errors exceeds the limits in few individual spots.
The screenshot above taken for the DVD+R disc from Digitex shows that the acceptable amount of PI Failures has been exceeded. Although, I should point out that the higher lever of PI failures can only be observed in the very beginning of the disc, while after that the burning quality is close to ideal.
PI Errors and PI Failures graphs do not indicate any quality issues here. The maximum number of errors of both types doesn’t go beyond the limits defined by the ECMA standards. If it hadn’t been for the slight increase in the PI Errors in the very end of the disc, I would have reported the burning quality as absolutely excellent in this case. Although, it is very good anyway.
The results obtained with a TDK DVD+R disc protested with the company’s brand name ScratchProof technology leaves a ton of positive emotions. There are very few errors of both types, which is strictly within the acceptable EMCA standards.
The burning quality with a 16x TDK DVD+R disc also proved very nice. Both parameters in question stayed within the acceptable boundaries. I would like to specifically stress that the PI Failures didn’t exceed 2, which is a very rare result. The number of PI Errors is also extremely low, and only in one single spot we can observe a certain upsurge.
In case of a DVD+R disc from Verbatim, we witness a tiny cloud against the blue skies of success. Despite the overall excellent burning quality, the number of PI Failures exceeded the allowed maximum in one spot, which slightly spoilt the good impression, I should say. Although, I would prefer to consider it just bad luck in our particular case.
The burning quality was quite acceptable in this case. Both considered parameters are within the limits defined by the ECMA. The important thing is that the maximum number of PI Failures doesn’t exceed 2.
The DVD-R scan from TDK shows very good burning quality all over the working surface. Unfortunately, despite the highly positive PI Error score, the number of PI Failures exceeds the allowed limits.
The DVD+RW disc from Fujifim showed very good burning quality. The maximum number of errors of both types is within the acceptable range, according to ECMA. I would also like to stress that this disc shows very even burning quality all the way.
In case of a DVD+RW disc from TDK we see that the number of PI Failures grew unacceptably high. So, we wouldn’t call this disc a quality one, according to the just discussed formal criteria.
The quality of the DVD-RW disc from Digitex also leaves much to be desired. The numbers went far beyond the acceptable limits. Moreover, the burning quality is very diverse over the entire disc.
The last disc from verbatim we used for our today’s tests proved very good. The numbers for PI Errors and PI Failures stayed within the ranges set by ECMA.
The external Sony DRX-800UL drive left a very favorable impression. Its stylish exterior design, dual-interface support and very advanced technical specifications speak for themselves. Being more specific about its advantages, we should definitely stress that it proved highly efficient during sound tracks extraction from audio discs. The results of our in-depth audio test prove this statement in full.
The hardware error correction logic is also very efficient, so I hope you will be able to eliminate numerous problems when working with the media of not the best quality. The burning quality also aroused no reproach. Most of the discs of different types and from different manufacturers showed their PI Error and Failure rates strictly within the standards set by the ECMA association, and in most cases they had a sufficient reserve left.
I would also like to mention the drive’s ability to read CD-ROM discs at lower speed as one of its advantages, because it allows to reduce the generated noise and to ensure that the device gets less heated up.
As for the evident drawbacks of the Sony DRX-800UL drive, it is certainly its price. $145 is about three times as much as you would pay for an internal drive of the same type, so I doubt that the users will be that very excited about it. I don’t think this product will enjoy massive demand unless it is a necessity. So, if you are in desperate need of an external burner drive like that and you have limited budget, you might as well consider the possibility of building one yourself with an internal optical solution and an external chassis (enclosure).