Plextor's $320 external 8X DVD burner, the PX-708UF.Photograph: Marc SimonThe never-ending quest for truth, justice, and faster DVD speeds continues with new burners that can write at up to 8X. We tested three of the first 8X DVD+R drives--from Hewlett-Packard, Plextor, and Sony--and found that the speed improvements varied from super to so-so depending on the drive, the software we used, and the size of the file we tried to write.
At press time, 8X burning was limited to DVD+R; drives with DVD-R, the competing write-once format, will begin shipping as you read this. Pioneer's DVR-A07 should be the first of these out of the gate.
In our DVD burning tests, we saw a wide range of performance differences, from negligible to a 30 percent boost over the 4X iteration of the same vendor's drive. Sony's $250 DRU-530A showed the least improvement over its 4X sibling, the DRU-510A. And neither of its write times approached those of the $200 HP DVD-Writer DVD400i or Plextor's $320 PX-708UF, a stylish, external USB 2.0 and FireWire burner (the internal model costs $220).
Each drive's specific mechanical design and firmware may help account for the performance gap. All three burners use constant linear velocity (CLV) to write to disc, starting at a slower speed before jumping to the maximum 8X write speed. Sony's drive doesn't jump to 8X (from 4X) until you have written more than 1.25GB of data; by contrast, Plextor's unit jumps at 700MB (from 6X), and HP's does so at 400MB (from 6X). According to Sony, however, if you burn a full 4.7GB disc, you'll see a greater performance boost in the DRU-530A over the older model; we saw about a 25 percent jump in our full-disc tests.
Distinctions such as those above underscore how companies are still fine-tuning DVD burning technology--and how an X-rating can be misleading. Don't expect vendors to stop using ratings: They are the main way that users currently make buying decisions, says Wolfgang Schlicting, director of research at IDC. But they sure aren't bulletproof.
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