detail information

What's inside the box?

On this page we will take a look at what the drive came shipped with, and take a look at the drive and its technology.

There is really not much to say about the box, it focuses clearly on the writing speeds and that this writer supports both DVD+R and DVD-R format. Let us instead take a closer look at the content of the box:

Not the biggest bundle we have seen, here is what we got:

⋅         The drive itself
⋅         Nero software installation CD
⋅         Cyberlink software installation CD
⋅         Small paper telling about the live update firmware updating program.
⋅         Audio cable
⋅         4 screws

This is what we are missing in the package: Printed manuals, or at least a quick installation guide! And empty discs (preferably at least one DVD recordable and one DVD ReWritable), as well as an IDE cable. On the positive side it has Nero 6 bundled, which is our favourite recording software.

Now it's time to take a look at the drive itself:

A pretty plain looking front bezel we may say, only the eject button and a LED, no headphone jack and volume knob, like most other drives have.

We could see that the drive is manufactured by Top Glory electronics (TOP-G) in China. Our sample is manufactured in March 2003.

On the back of the drive there are from the left: digital audio connector; analogue audio connector; pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master; IDE connector, power connector and six undocumented pins that is probably used to calibrate the drive at the factory.

We quickly installed the drive without any problems and here is a screenshot from Nero info tool:

Our drive came shipped with firmware B118, for most tests in this review we will be using the latest version B120 firmware. A few tests are also re-done with firmware B122 and B222 to see if that fixed some of the problems found in this review. It does not support DVD-RAM reading/writing and Mt. Rainier, but few drives support this. It also lacks support for reading CD+G discs. We would also like to see a larger buffer than 2Mb, but beside these points it seems to be a good drive.

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM:

We do not really find anything alarming here, but Mount Rainier support and a larger buffer would have been nice.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the write technology used by the BTC DRW1108IM:

CD-Recordable:

As we could see the BTC DRW1108IM uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 40x. This gives an average speed of 32.16x. This seems to be pretty fast, but let us look at two other drives first:

The NEC ND-2500A uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity), to write at its maximum speed of 32X. The drive wrote the last zone at 32X and this gives an average speed of 27.16x.

As we could see the Plextor PX-708A uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writing strategy to reach it rated speed of 40X. This gives an average speed of 33.38x.

For comparison we have made the following table: 

The drive did very well and it's only a few seconds slower than the fastest drives.

CD-ReWritable:

The BTC DRW1108IM uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writing technology to write at 24X for ultra speed CD-RW discs, the average speed is 23.56x. This also seems to be pretty fast, but let us again take a look at the writing strategy of two other drives:

The Pioneer DVR-107D uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity), to write at its rated speed of 24x, this gives an average speed of 22.47x.

The Plextor PX-708A, with its P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) write speed of 24X for Ultra Speed CD-RW discs is among the faster writers due to its high starting speed of 20.01x. For a better overview we present the following comparison table:

Again there is only a few seconds in difference compared to the fastest drives, very good.

8X DVD-Writing speed:

The BTC DRW1108IM uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) to write at 8x. It uses three zones to achieve 8x speed. The first zone from 0-0,9Gb is done at 4x speed, the next zone from 0,9Gb to 2,7Gb is done at 6x speed and the last zone from 2,7Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x. This gives an average speed of 6.38x. This clearly seems like the slowest drive we have ever seen, but let us compare these results with some other writers:

The NEC ND-2500A uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,8Gb is done at 4x speed, the next zone from 0,8Gb to 2,2Gb is done at 6x speed and the last zone from 2,2Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x. This gives an average speed of 6.80x. The speed is the same for both DVD-R and DVD+R discs.

The Plextor PX-708A also uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,7Gb is done at 6x speed; the next zone from 0,7Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x speed. This gives an average speed of 7.69x, look below to see a comparison table:

As we all could see it's easily the slowest writer of them all and is over two minutes slower than the fastest writers.

Features and techniques:

Changing book type tool (bitsetting).

According to our information this drive should support bitsetting and a utility for changing the book type is downloadable from http://www.drwupdate.com

Unfortunately the utility refuses to start on our review computer so we were unable to test it out. We did also try DVDinfoPRO 2.50, but we just get this message:

So, it doesn't seem like bitsetting is supported after all. BTC must also fix their own bitsetting program to work on all computers.

Included software:

Now it's time to look at the included software, and comment it if needed. Notice that we may not use the included software in our performance testing part of the review.

CyberLink DVD solution:

The CyberLink DVD solution package contains the following programs:

Power DVD 5:

PowerDVD 5 is a good and widely used DVD/media player and is a good choice.

 PowerProducer 2:

PowerProducer 2 is used to make movie discs of files from various sources. The next picture shows what disc/compilation types you could choose.

The disc could be created as DVD, VCD, SVCD, MiniDVD or editable project. You could also choose quality and regional options from here.

MediaShow:

MediaShow is used to create slideshow movies out of still images or movies out of smaller video clips.

Nero OEM suite:

We guess that the Ahead program suite is not new to most of you; it contains programs for creating most types of CD/DVD discs. Packet writing program, media player etc. Our favourite writing program suite, and thus BTC gets a plus in our book for including it.

The Nero CD does also contain the manual for the BTC DRW1108IM, which - to be hones - is one of the worst manuals we have seen. It basically only shows how to connect the drive and tells what the drive supports of reading and writing. The manual is not found from the Autorun menu either and you have to manually brows the CD to find the manual, very disappointing.

Now that we have finished examining the drive and its writing strategies it's time to head on to next page, which is reading performance test…