Part of conclusion:

The Philips DVDRW208 is a very impressive DVD+RW drive. Its performance is very similar to that of the HP dvd100i. In our tests, it was able to write to DVD+RW media at 2.4x and read them back at 8x without any problems. These speeds allowed us to write an entire 4.7GB DVD in under 25 minutes.

The DVDRW208 also performed quite well as a CD-RW drive and DVD reader. In our tests, the drive had no problem reaching 32x for all types of media and had some good seek times. The drive's DAE performance was also pretty good, even though it insisted on slowing down with pressed audio CD's. When reading data or movie DVD's or DVD+RW discs, the drive had no problems reaching speeds of 8x. The DVDRW208 also did better than the HP dvd100i when reading DVD-R discs. What surprised me most though was that the Philips was able to read DVD-RW media. This is something the HP dvd100i was not able to do.