A Big Performance Surprise!
We wanted to use the fastest-available media for all of our tests, yet our system didn’t always perform perfectly on the first try. Small changes, such as enabling streaming data in Nero’s benchmark software, were needed before everything worked perfectly, and for that we needed additional discs.
We pulled out some old “VERBATIMc” media for basic configuration checks, but came upon some odd results.
Asus pushes our 2009 Verbatim 4x media to 10x max, almost matching our super-expensive imported Sony NN3 media. Everyone wants to see these drives archive data quickly and cheaply, and this is certainly a big step in that direction.
LG wrote our 4x test disks at 8x. While not as fast as Asus, that's still twice the rated speed for this media.
Plextor’s drive saw that this media was rated at 4x and stopped there.
We could easily fault Plextor for not overspeeding old media, but we could also raise questions about data integrity at the higher speed. Fortunately, there were no errors in any of today’s writes, and anyone who doesn’t trust that tidbit is welcome to peruse this article’s photo album for a complete set of scan results.
