DVD Burners Spin to 8X
Hewlett-Packard, Plextor, and Sony debut new drives.Melissa J. Perenson
Photograph by Marc Simon
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.
The 8x Performance Edge (chart)
Results are varied, but Plextor is the clear winner: Its 8X model outperformed both its 4X predecessor and its 8X rivals.