detail information

Basic scanning consistency test:

The purpose of this test is to test out the scanning consistency of our scanning drives. The aim of the test is to scan the same piece of media 5 times on each of our scanning drives. We should point out that we don't expect any of these drives to scan with 100% consistency.

Testing method:

We chose one piece of Taiyo Yuden YUDEN000T02 media and burned the disc at its rated speed of 8x on the Sony AW-G170A (firmware 1.71)

Our next task was to scan the prewritten media on each of our scanning drives 5 times in succession. After each scan, the disc was ejected then reloaded before continuing to the next scan. In the case of our Plextor drive which requires two passes to complete a PI/PIF test. The disc was not ejected after the SUM8 test, the SUM1 test was run then the disc was ejected and reloaded before starting the next scan.

The obtained results can be seen below.

BenQ DW1640:

Scan 1

Scan 2

Scan 3

Scan 4

Scan 5

Scan 4 let the drive down badly, had the drive not reported a much higher PI total in this scan, the BenQ DW1640 result would have been reasonable.

Lite-On SHW-16H5S:

Scan1

Scan 2

Scan 3

Scan 4

Scan 5

The Lite-On SHW-16H5S did well in our consistency tests; the PI totals are all pretty similar as are the PIF totals.

NEC ND-4570A:

Scan 1

Scan 2

Scan 3

Scan 4

Scan 5

The NEC ND-4570A did well in the PI ratings, but was let down badly with apparently random PIF spikes.

Plextor PX-760A:

Scan 1

Scan 2

Scan 3

Scan 4

Scan 5

The Plextor PX-760A did well with our consistency tests. The totals are all pretty similar, a good result.

Summary:

Once again the drives from Plextor and Lite-On came out the winners in our scanning consistency tests. We would however like to point out that the number of samples taken were low (5 scans on each drive) and this could in some way account for the widely varying results with the BenQ and NEC drives.

This concludes our tests. Let's head over to the last page where you can read our conclusion….

Verbatim MCC03RG20

Conclusion