Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Storage > Optical Storage > Three Generations Compared: Is Your DVD Burner Outdated?

Three Generations Compared: Is Your DVD Burner Outdated?

07:10 - Friday 30 October 2009 by Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos

1. Old Versus New: DVD Drives Compared
2. Read And Write Speeds
3. NEC ND-4570A (2005, 16x)
4. Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7173A (2006, 18x)
5. Sony Optiarc AD-7240S (2009, 24x)
6. Comparison Table And Test Setup

Roughly $30 is all you need to get a decent CD/DVD burner.

Blu-ray drives, which increase capacities from 8.5GB (double layer DVDs) to 25GB, are still rather expensive and fail to deliver acceptable cost per gigabyte ratios, especially when weighed against ever-falling hard drive prices. Still, there has been progress in the DVD segment, and we wanted to take a closer look.

You can tell how mature the DVD drive market has become by all of the sub-$40 prices for DVD burners. Even the latest and greatest DVD drives are fairly affordable. With one of these in-hand, it’s hard to think of new features that would persuade anyone to upgrade.

However, there are a few facts to consider before blowing off the entire segment and buying the cheapest drive you can find. True, read speeds for DVDs and CDs really haven’t changed for years due to physical limits imposed by high spindle speeds. Write speeds have kept climbing, though, reaching 24x with the latest generation. This sounds impressive, but the real-life impact on disc write times is actually rather small. All modern DVD burners write data in CAV mode at constant angular velocity, which means that the disc spins at a constant RPM. As a result, the write bandwidth starts at rather slow bit rates and reaches its maximum when writing to the disc’s outer tracks. This is where 24x speed has its greatest impact.

Other advances can be found on the interface side. More and more optical drives are now based on the convenient Serial ATA standard rather than UltraATA, which requires a jumper setting to put the drive into master or slave mode. SATA is faster but also much more common on modern motherboards. Lastly, many newer drives support disc labeling technologies, such as Labelflash or LightScribe. Unfortunately, these two aren’t compatible and require different media if you want to label them using the drive’s laser.

We took three different DVD burner generations from NEC (16x from 2005), Sony NEC Optiarc (18x from 2006), and Sony Optiarc (24x from 2009) to look at the real differences between various product generations. These three products were provided by Sony Optiarc, formerly known as the joint venture between Sony and NEC.

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will_chellam 30/10/2009 11:40

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I'm glad the DAE benchmakrs were included as for me this always was the prime consideration in deciding on my drive - i remember the days when i bought my liteon drive that did DAE at 8 speed and marvelled at the speed compared to my previous drive.

I used to have an NEC 3550A in my cube system (1 drive bay only) so for me read performance was probably more important than anything else.

Anonymous 30/10/2009 12:30

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How is it possible that they can write at 18-24x speed but only read at 16x?

tinnerdxp 30/10/2009 14:25

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I tend to avoid optical media at all cost... Although I find CDs quite reliable... DVDs were always a pain... Having used about 4-5 different recorders in my computers over the past few years and a variety of media... I find that DVDs last for just a couple of months until they get scratched to the point where best drives on the market cannot read them... Not to mention that reliability with speeds over x4 is just ridiculous... and if you use DVD-R the reliability drops even more... Funnily the brand of the media is not that important apparently... Have tried shit Tesco's DVD-R, TDK's + and -, Verbatims + and -, Sony's + and -, Imation + and - and so on... bottom line is, never use DVD-R unless you really have to... Always use +, record at 2x or 4x tops and use "better" brands in general... and yet - even if you store your DVDs properly... there is 40% of chances that 12 months down the line - you won't be able to read the discs... So - my recommendation - separate hard drives or Raid 5 in a home server... It does actually make sense these days...
1TB HDD = £60
100 x TDK or Verbatim DVD+R in a spindle = £20, then you need some CD/DVD case for them - which is basically another £10 (minimum) for let's say a hundred discs...
100 x DVD+R = 470GB so to match 1TB you need 213 DVDs... That's already £60 for 200 of them... and the time you spend burning discs or trying to find anything or even restore the data is well wasted... So why bother? Blueray efficiency is even worse... so just get basic DVDRW drive... and another 1TB drive... You can put few of them in your rig anyway - so why bother with discs???
Got 4x1TB drives in the home server using Raid5 and giving me 2.7TB of secure storage... then 300GB raptor + 2x1TB in my main desktop and to be honest... last time I've burned a disk - was yesterday - to install new Ubuntu... Otherwise I use 8GB USB drive... Why bother with burning anything better than CDs?

enkidoe 01/11/2009 15:57

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Pitty the harddrives are still much larger compared to dvd and blu ray.

juan248 02/11/2009 22:36

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well i stole my drive from my older comp. since i had no money to buy a new one

praetorianguard 03/11/2009 16:09

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@tinnerdxp
What in the name of all that's holy, do you do to your discs to make them so unreliable?! I've got a number of discs from 1999 & 2000 that still work just fine and a lot of my burnt DVDs are at least 5 years old. Granted, I don't expect them to last forever, but they are quite reliable.
I tend to avoid optical media where necessary, opting for external USB storage in one form or another. That said, when I do use recordable DVDs, I tend to prefer '+' over '-' and I never go 'cheap' in the interests of longevity. I write all media at 16x and I honestly can't remember the last time I made a frisbee (it's been at least 2 years). I wouldn't dismiss optical media just yet.

Anonymous 04/11/2009 10:20

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@pretorianguard
I agree, I occasionally do make a frisbee, but my entire movie collection is either MPEG2 or MPEG4 on DVD-/+ Rs, and for the most part they play fine in my $30 dvd player. No point having a media centre just yet as I'm sure it would confuse my other half. Also I tend to upgrade hard drives less often now, all my originals stay pristine and contrary to that even on the cheapest discs I can find I've been able to go back to movies burned 5 years ago!

devilxc 04/11/2009 13:58

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I use datawrite titanium and they are excellent. I get maybe one coaster in 50 discs now. HDDs are good but you lose less if a single optical disc dies.

Scottismo 05/11/2009 01:35

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In response to tinnerdxp; if you ever try optical media again you may be interested in the following information which has helped me achieve good quality DVD burns recently.

For a guide on DVD media:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

For finding out whether you have 1st, 2nd or 3rd class media:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm

Additionally, certain burning software such as ImgBurn can use DvdInfoPro which can be a useful tool to help determine if your burn has problems.
http://www.imgburn.com/ & http://www.dvdinfopro.com/

Finally, in a recent google search I performed, various articles actually stated that it was more beneficial to burn the discs at the maximum speed they support as they are apparently designed with this in mind and are not optimised for low-speed burns, which may be why you had a coaster problem. Unfortunately I don't have any links to back this up; I must not have saved them. I know this goes against the old "burn slow" adage but it seems to have worked for me so far combined with quality discs (I bought a 100 pack of Taiyo Yuden as mentioned in this article.

Regards,
Scottismo

Scottismo 05/11/2009 01:45

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EDIT: I made a copy & pasting blunder! Is it not possible to edit your posts? I meant to put:

For finding out whether you have 1st, 2nd or 3rd class media:
http://dvd.identifier.cdfreaks.com/

..and to close the parenthesis in the last sentence

I also forgot to mention that you have to have a good burner to start with! I have an NEC ND-3520A. Cdfreaks is an excellent place to get regular reviews on burners BTW (aside from THG!)

I'm in a helpful mood methinks