Three Generations Compared: Is Your DVD Burner Outdated?
Table of contents
- 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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- Three Generations Compared: Is Your DVD Burner Outdated?
Since i burn most of my stuff at a max of 8x (usually 4x anyhow) im still using two old faithfull LG H10N's which have never let me down - dont see a reason to upgrade unless i get a new rig, then ill buy SATA etc but untill then there fine - pointless upgrading.
DVD burner + 50 pack of dual-layer DVD's: under $100.
12X Blu-ray burner? $82,000
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/3752/sonysucks.png
Sony suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks!
I'm finding DVD writers less and less useful. The discs simply don't hold enough data. My backups (on a second hard drive) currently take over 450GB compressed. That would require over 100 DVD's which would cost almost as much as a hard drive of the same capacity. For file transfers using the network, usb drives or even online storage are more convenient... I'd need discs that hold 50-100GB for it to be useful...
Thanks for doing all the research on this. I've always figured that the DVD drives are good for at least a few upgrades but it's nice to have solid data.
LightScribe, etc is nice and all that but not worth the $30-40 for just that feature; a sharpie works well enough for me.
Shaving a couple minutes off a full DVD burn also doesn't justify the extra expenditure, at least for me.
I am considering such an upgrade - for yet another reason:
The optical drive is the last drive in my system that uses the PATA interface, and on the mobo it's an option rom. Which blanks the screen during startup to display it's own message and pauses startup for a second.
I will upgrade just for the quicker startup when I disable the PATA interface.
- Bertus.
Interesting to see such an article really. But honestly I never use my dvd drive! It isn't even connnected. Only do so when I need to reinstall windows, which is a rare thing.
As a movie buff I've burned over 2000 DVD5's over the last 5 years. DVD9's - 200 BUT DVD9's the WORKED 50. I wish rewriteable dual layer would come out, and RELIABLE double layer would come down in price.
P.S. 90% of the DVD's are inkjet hub printable, and I'm only on my second Epson R200 but well over 200 generic ink cartridges.
After all that , I still find myself burning 8x single layer DVD-R Verbatim for cost and quality. Gone through 8 or 9 dvd burners, 5 pioneers, one each nec , benq, liteon, LG, and sony.
DVD burner? Not exactly my top priority. You need the drive, but I have actually only burnt about 10 DVD's in my life. Some people I guess will go nuts over burning movie DVDs. I know people who used to do the same thing with VHS tapes. In the end, you have a thousand DVDS, Tapes or whatever that you will never watch. I have a closet full of them that I have bought over the years. All they do is take up room, I can't remember the last time I actually took 1 out and watched it. It has literally been years.
in any case burners usually have a life span of 2 years.
sometimes 3,so you have to replace them all the time anyways (they usually only have 2 years of warranty)
well, i rarely use my ODD anyway. I rarely read anything or write anything. Unfortunely due to price, lack of versatility and slow/little improvements they are now in the way of the dodo.
Blue ray has more space, but the price is just too big. Flash is here to stay, and has evolved fast enough to overpace them. Good article none the less.
Any reason why you'd want a SATA drive over a PATA? The only benefit I can see with the former is that PATA will probably die eventually making a SATA drive potentially longer lasting. In my eyes that doesn't seem like it's coming very quickly; even high end motherboards still come with IDE ports. Personally, I'd rather my DVD drive be IDE just because I'd rather save my SATA ports for things that actually need the bandwidth. I guess it's all just about preference then?
Anyway interesting article, you guys at toms have been on your game in the past couple months.
The real problem is whether the DVD disk will stand this speed or fail.
I found it quite hard to maintain quality burns above 12x even using Sony dvds, thats why I stick with the reliable 8x
I only bought a new drive because I wanted SATA only cables in my system... that big ass piece of wiring was too messy for me...
Though, if you don't have too, reuse your old drives. Having multiple drives is very convenient.
If I didn't hate the old ribbon so much (makes cable management a pain), I'd have 3 drives in my system right now...
Wish SATA cables were also powered... having 5 HDDs and 1 DVD drive is a lot of cables, a single cable setup would remove 5 cables, making shit so much easier...
Fuck Blu-Ray.
I wanted HD-DVD...
i usually burn at one or two steps below the maximum speed (40x for CDs and 12x for DVDs) - for added reliability. Just from experience, no real scientific basis. So i'm not particularly interested in faster write speeds. And i always set the verify disk after disk creation option on. So to write a DVD it may take me around 10 minutes. Don't mind though as i multitask and do other things instead of just sitting idly waiting, waiting, and cursing, and waiting...
Why underclock your test machine?
I bought an external usb dvd drive. That way I never have to reach down and touch my pc, unless I am tearing it apart.
I have a Sata DVD Burner and I use it often but as of late I find myself burning more CD's then DVD's. Most Linux ISO's are CD based and thats what I do (I could put multiple ISO's on a DVD but thats more pain then its worth)
I think mine is one of those 24X models but this article is correct about media speeds. I still have some 4X disks that I am trying to use up lol The fastest DVD disks I have are 12X.
I wonder why DVD drives break so easily after recording about 100DVD's...
I remember the first Audio CD players released in home stereo systems still function fine today!
I'm finding DVD writers less and less useful. The discs simply don't hold enough data. My backups (on a second hard drive) currently take over 450GB compressed. That would require over 100 DVD's which would cost almost as much as a hard drive of the same capacity. For file transfers using the network, usb drives or even online storage are more convenient... I'd need discs that hold 50-100GB for it to be useful...
I totally agree, I can't even remember the last time I used mine LOL. I buy all of my games through steam and music/movies online.
One thing to keep in mind with any removable media drive is that they are ATA-PI (Packet Inferface) meaning that the commands for the drive are sent in a packet. The packet needs two reads/writes instead of the one that a ATA device would need. So a drive plugged into a IDE-33 only gets half that for a ATA-PI device. SATA is all packets and the commands can be sent using the few extra bytes that are needed instead of effective reducing the bandwisth in half for commands.