detail information

Re-Writing data:

For this test we set up a new compilation containing 650Mb of data in Nero Burning ROM. We used the DAO (Disc At Once) writing method. In the screenshot below you can see the burn process completed successfully.

The LG GSA-4040B used 5 minutes and 24 seconds for writing the disc at 16X, let us compare this to some other writers; The Lite-On LTC-48161H using CAV(Constant Angular Velocity) writing tech used 4 minutes and 56 seconds to write the disc, the Plextor PX-708A which uses P-CAV(Partial Constant Angular Velocity) writing strategy used 3 minutes and 43 seconds to write the disc. It's actually not much slower than the Lite-On due to the slow writing method of the Lite-On, but it lags behind the plextor by about 1.5 minutes.

And here is the writing time for writing 4.4Gb of data to a 2X Verbatim DVD-RW disc:

The drive used 30 minutes and 11 seconds to write the disc at 2X. Compared to the Memorex Dual-X (needed 28 minutes and 51 seconds to write the disc) this is actually a bit slower.

And finally here is the writing time for writing 4.4Gb of data to a 2.4X Traxdata DVD+RW disc:

The LG GSA-4040B used 23 minutes and 47 seconds to write the disc, the Memorex Dual-X used 23 minutes and 6 seconds and the Sanyo CRD-BPDV2 used 23 minutes and 53s to write the same amount of data. This places the Memorex between these two writers.

CD-RW Packet writing:

Now it's time to take a look at the packet writing performance of the LG GSA-4040B. We used Ahead's InCD 4 as well as the included B's Clip software to format and write 401 MB (421 003 264 bytes) data to the disc.

CD-RW packet writing performance:

As we could see the performance with Ahead's InCD 4 is not that good, but in B's Clip the performance is considerably better. On the other side InCD 4 uses very short time to format the disc. Since B's clip showed better performance than InCD 4 we decided to continue using B's clip for the rest of the tests.

DVD-RW/DVD+RW packet writing tests:

In theory the performance should be higher, especially for the DVD+RW disc, but in practical use this is what you could expect. At least when using B's Clip packet writing program, other programs may perform better.

DVD-RAM performance:

This drive is one of few drives that also supports the DVD-RAM format, and first we got surprised when we looked at the recording side of the disc:

You could see a very fascinating pattern of darker spots, supposedly these spots is used for calibration while writing and reading.

But how do it perform while writing? To find this out we first created a disc containing 4,2Gb of data in Nero burning ROM:

Since the drive used way to long time for 3X writing (37m 44s) we also used the create data disc function in Nero CD-Speed to write:

And sure enough, the write speed is actually below 1.5X! At first we thought there was something wrong, but after some reading about the DVD-RAM format we realized that the reason for the low speed is that it constantly reads back the data after writing it to verify that it's written correctly. But still we think that advertising it as 3X is wrong since there is no way to reach 3X in practical use, it should be more advertised as a 1,5X DVD-RAM writer.

And then we used the included DVD-RAM driver/software and formatted the disc to the UDF1.5 format:

Actually the result is not very much slower when using the 'packet writing" function. The advantage for DVD-RAM is when using it for backup, as it's pretty safe due to the verifying function, for normal usage it's to slow.

Before we round off this review, let us run the drive through some advanced tests at next page…