Fast-Lane DVD Burning

Speedy DVDs

The primary distinctions between DVD burners are formats and performance (as indicated by the drive's X-number). The DVD world has shifted to dual-format drives that support the two leading, competing writable formats, DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW. Of the drives on our chart, only those from Hewlett-Packard and Benq support just one format (DVD+R/RW)--and both vendors are moving toward dual-format support in the future (Benq is offering a $10 firmware update to add 2X DVD-R, 1X DVD-RW writing support to its drive, and HP will soon ship its first dual-format model). The advantage to buying a drive with both formats is that you can feel free to buy whichever media is cheaper or more readily available.

Of the ten dual-format drives in our roundup, only three have matching 8X DVD+R and -R write speeds--Kano Technologies' $170 K8Xtreme, Memorex's $200 True 8X Dual Format DVD Recorder, and Pioneer's $230 DVR-A07. By the time you read this, however, drives that write at 8X in both formats are likely to have become more common.

While all of the drives in our roundup can burn at 8X speed to 8X-rated media, three of them can write at that speed to some brands of the cheaper and more plentiful 4X media. Both Plextor's $200 PX-708A and TDK's $300 External Indi DVD 840G 8x Multiformat write at 8X to 4X +R media; Kano's drive, however, is the only one that does so to 4X -R.

Regardless of which write-once format a drive uses, performance improvements are no longer linear. Thus, for example, whereas a 2X drive takes approximately 30 minutes to write a complete disc, and a 4X drive takes about 15 minutes, an 8X drive requires 9 minutes or so. Unlike earlier drives, the new 8X drives write data at multiple speeds, as if they were shifting gears. They divide the write process into zones and start at a slower speed such as 6X or even 4X--typically for the first 500MB or so--before jumping to 8X. This approach to writing an optical disc is not new: CD-RW drives write in zones, too.

Some vendors choose to jump speeds later in the write process, a choice that affects performance. Sony's $205 DRU-530A writes at 4X for the first 1.25GB, while LG Electronics' $170 GSA-4081B starts at 4X and then jumps to 6X at 300MB and to 8X at 2GB. Both of these drives lagged on our write-once performance test and failed to make the chart.

We've also noticed that Memorex, Pioneer, Plextor, and TDK are slowing down their drives' DVD-Video read speed to 2X (the latter two vendors' drives can temporarily disable this function). According to drive makers, this is done to reduce drive noise during playback. But the limitation can become frustrating when you're trying to copy a DVD movie.

Meanwhile, with dual-format drives taking over, another format--DVD-RAM--is being left behind. Only a few drive makers, including LG, support DVD-RAM, which is the slowest of the rewritable formats. DVD-RAM works best for backups (due to its built-in error correction) and for reading DVDs created on DVD-RAM-capable set-top DVD recorders for TV, such as those from Panasonic.

Tracking Performance

To see just how the latest generation of 8X rewritable DVD drives stacks up, we ran the drives through DVD and CD mastering and DVD packet-writing tests. We found that the competition was tight.

Before proceeding, we asked each of the multiformat-drive vendors which format they preferred that we use for testing. Pioneer specified -R/RW; all the others, +R/RW. For comparison, we tested the Pioneer DVR-A07 using both formats. The results for 8X a??R and +R on this drive were close (just 20 seconds separated them). We saw a bigger differential between the rewritable formats--it took 17 minutes, 59 seconds, or nearly twice as long, to packet-write to DVD-RW as it did to DVD+RW, because we had to use 2X DVD-RW media, in spite of the drive's 4X speed rating (4X DVD-RW media was unavailable in time for our tests, but it should appear in stores soon).

For the most part, what we saw fell in line with each drive's X-numbers. A mere 75 seconds separated the fastest and slowest drives on our write-once tests. Nevertheless, Sony's DRU-530A and LG's GSA-4081B were about 20 percent slower than the average drive while writing DVD+R at 8X; we attribute this lag to these drives' comparatively late zone jumps.

The Plextor drive was the fastest performer on our write-once test, in which we used each drive's bundled disc mastering software to copy 4.35GB of data to an 8X disc. The PX-708A took 8 minutes, 21 seconds to complete our test--just 1 second ahead of the TDK, and 2 seconds ahead of Pioneer's DVR-A07.

In our packet-writing tests--where we formatted a rewritable disc and dragged and dropped 2.64GB of files and folders onto the disc--the Kano K8Xtreme took the top spot, requiring just 8 minutes, 52 seconds to complete this task. Its closest competitor was the Plextor, which took 11 seconds longer. By contrast, the Memorex True 8X Dual Format DVD Recorder and the LG GSA-4081B were slower by 3 minutes and by 2 minutes, 10 seconds, respectively, than the Kano drive.

CD write performance is greatly improved with this generation of DVD burners. Fully half of the 12 models tested can write to CD-R at 40X, and all perform comparably--a mere 14 seconds separates the six drives, with the Plextor and the TDK drives tying for the fastest time to master a 700MB disc, at 3 minutes, 2 seconds on our test. Five of the drives--from Benq, Memorex, HP, Pioneer, and LG--write to CD-R at only 24X, while the Kano falls somewhere in the middle with a 32X CD-R rating.

Beyond Speed

Outside of performance, we saw few variations in these drives' main features. Benq's $140 DW800A was the only model to include convenient audio playback controls on the front faceplate, which saves you from having to launch a separate app to play and control audio CDs. And half of the drives--the ones from HP, Kano, LG, Memorex, Pioneer, and Sony--lack headphone jacks and volume controls, features that provide an easy way to listen to your audio CDs without snaking a cord behind your PC.

All of the drives here included documentation that will guide you through installation, but only HP, Memorex, Sony, and TDK supplement these instructions with comprehensive CD-based manuals.

Software is an important part of a drive package. All 12 drives bundled basic software, but the Alera, HP, Pacific Digital, and Pioneer models also had dedicated video editing applications (the first comes with Ulead's VideoSuite 7SE; the other three, ArcSoft's ShowBiz 2.0). Surprisingly, the Alera, Lite-On, and Pacific Digital carried older versions of Sonic Solutions' software (Lite-On offers an upgrade online).

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