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 32X for CD's, except CD-RW that should be read at 24X. It's also quite interesting to see if it lives up to its specified read speed of 10X for DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW.

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:

The drive reached its rated speed of 32X at the end and the overall read speed is 24.57X. We compare it to other DVD-Writers in the table found below:

It could only be directly compared to the Memorex dual-X since the other 3 drives is able to read at 40X speed. Compared to the Memorex it comes out slightly behind at speed, but makes up for it by having better seek times than the Memorex.

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.

Nothing changes here and the result is about identical to reading an pressed disc. The usual comparison table is found below.

We have nothing more to add as it places about identical in this test as in the pressed disc test. We can't complain as it reaches its specified speeds.

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.

As the specifications states the drive is locked at 24X for reading CD-RW discs, how this compares to other drives is found in the table below:

Speed wise it lags behind the other drives since it's locked at 24x reading. On the other hand it's among the best at seek times.

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the LG GSA-4040B 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 (77:56:58).

Again the drive is locked at 24x for reading. There is quite a few drives that reads audio at a lower speed than the maximum speed, so let us compare some drive in the table below:

Well, due to its low reading speed of only 24X it places last again. The seek times is about average this time.

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed as expected in the burst mode test and got an average speed of 17.5x, but in the secure mode test it actually impressed us by giving back an average speed of 15.9x, just slightly slower than for the burst mode test.

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.

We got pretty disappointed when we saw that the drive failed pretty bad in this test. It's a long time since we last had a drive that did not get a perfect score of 100 in this test, and it's even longer since we had a drive to get such a low score as 75. Yes we did try with a new disc but the result stayed the same. Beside this it's only capable of doing on the fly copies up to 12X, but supports everything except reading data from the lead-out.

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 and recordable DVD discs at 10X according to the specifications.

DVD - DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with a 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. Notice: Even if some of these discs contains DVD-Video they are identified as DVD-ROM discs for a reason or another, it's a disc issue and not a drive issue, we did several tests and this do not seem to affect the results of the tests in any way.

We can't complain as the drive reached its rated speed of 12X on the single layer disc. The dual layer disc was read at 8X Max speed. How this compares to other drives is found in the table below:

*Notice that newest version of CD-speed actually reports the highest speed as the end reading speed for the dual layer disc.

The drive performed very well in this test and was the winner except for the single layer disc where the Memorex Dual-X marginally beats it.

DVD - DVD+R(W):

For this test we used a Ritek 4X DVD+R and a Memorex 2.4X DVD+RW with about 4,4Gb of data. Below are the results:

The drive did not manage to reach the advertised speed of 10X, but is actually limited to 8X. 8X is not that bad compared to other drives found in the table below:

As we could see the drive outperformed all the other drives, nice work from LG on implementing such good reading capabilities of DVD media, to bad it do not read at its advertised speed of 10X.

DVD - DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD-R disc and a Ritek 1X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4,4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

As we could see out from these graphs, the drive performed nearly the same with DVD-R/RW discs as with DVD+R/RW discs. Below is a comparison table:

Again it was able to outperform all of the other tested drives, and it did not have any problems with slowdowns etc that have plagued some other drives.

DVD - DVD-RAM:

Since this drive supports writing DVD-RAM discs it of course also supports reading them. There is very few drives supporting the DVD-RAM format, but we found two other drives to compare this drive with at least. The Maxell DVD-RAM disc we used is filled with about 4,3Gb of data.

The drive read the DVD-RAM disc at 3X CLV (Constant Linear Velocity), how this compares to the two other drives is found in the table below:

Not much to say really, although all drives is limited to reading DVD-RAM discs at low speeds the LG GSA-4040B is the fastest reader out of the tested drives.

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