detail information

Reading performance:

For these tests we will use Nero CD/DVD-Speed to read various CD and DVD's, including audio discs and DVD-media. As already mentioned in the introduction, this drive sports a specified read speed of 12X for DVD's and 40X for CD's.

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing PlexTools v1.08 that is exactly 74 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

We don't know why, but the drive did have some problems reading the plextools disc and slowed down the reading speed while reading it, to see how this compares to other drives, look below:

Due to the slowdown in reading speed it ends up as the slowest drive. But seek time is very good.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 CD. The disc we used was a Verbatim 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

There were no problems reading CD-R disc copy and it had no problems reaching 40x. The usual comparison table is found below.

This time it's pretty fast and is among the better drives for both speed and seek times.

CD-ReWritable discs:

Again we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 disc, this time we used a Verbatim High Speed (10X) CD-RW disc made by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

The drive reads CD-RW discs at a bit above 32x speed only, to see how this compares to other drives; look below:

Pretty average we may say, both for speed and seek times. It can't compete with the drives reading the discs at full speed of course.

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the BTC DRW1108IM, we again used Nero CD/DVD-Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it's about 78 minutes long (77:56:57).

The drive had no problems with reading the audio disc at full speed and everything seems good, so let us compare the result with other drives:

Very good! It's among the faster drives for extracting audio.

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed as expected in the burst mode test, and excellent in the secure mode test, with a speed of 18.3x it's the fastest drive we've had for secure extraction.

Advanced audio - DAE quality test:

Before we move on to testing DVD read speeds we will take a last audio test, this time we used the 'Advanced DAE Quality Test" feature in CD-Speed.

The extracting quality should be very good, but it lacks support for reading data from the lead-out and lead-in. This may affect its abilities to read protected audio discs, which we will test later in this review.

DVD reading performance:

Again we will use Nero CD-Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 12X.

DVD - DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with single and dual layered DVD video discs. While only 1X speed is required to watch DVD movies, it's useful to be able to read the discs at higher speeds if you're going to extract (rip) the content of the disc to your hard drive.

As we can see, this drive does only read DVD-Video discs at 6x speed. How this compares to other drives may be seen in the table below.

*Notice that the disc contains a bit less data than the disc used with the other drives, this is because the other larger discs we had is made with DVD-ROM booktype and this may affect the reading performance, and thus we have switched over to this disc with DVD-Video booktype.

The BTC DRW1108IM ends up among the slowest drives due to the limited reading speed of only 6x. Just for comparison we tried a data DVD-ROM disc (Baldurs gate) as well:

As we could see it was close to reaching 12x with the DVD-ROM disc, if the disc was a full disc it would probably not have any problems reaching 12x.

DVD - DVD+R(W):

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD+R and a Ricoh 4X DVD+RW with about 4,4Gb of data. Below are the results:

The reading speed was locked to 8x for DVD+R and 6x for DVD+RW.

It did ok with the DVD+R disc but lags behind most other drives when reading DVD+RW discs due to the low reading speed of only 6x.

DVD - DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD-R disc and a Verbatim 2X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4,4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

There are hardly any differences compared to reading the DVD+R/RW discs.

Nothing changes here and it's pretty fast at reading the DVD-R disc, but lags behind for the DVD-RW disc.

Overall thoughts:

Overall, the reading capabilities are ok, but not more. So there is room for improvement as there was some reading problems reading the original CD, and we would like to see faster reading speeds for all types of Re-Writable media. Some of you may also be annoyed by the slow reading speed of only 6x for DVD-Video discs.

But now it's time to head on to a more interesting part: Writing CD-R discs…