detail information

The specifications of the MSI DR8-A2 state that the drive is able to write CD-R discs at 40x. Let us find out how the drive really performs in speed and quality.

Writing Data CD-R discs:

Let us first take a look at the CD-R write technology used by the MSI DR8-A2:

As we could see the MSI DR8-A2 uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 40x. This gives an average speed of 31.45x. Seems to be about average for 40x recorders. Two drives for comparison is found below.

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.

And as a last test we wrote a disc containing 700Mb using Nero Burning ROM software. Writing method used is DAO (Disc At Once), and the disc is set up as a non-multisession disc with 'finalize disc" enabled.

The MSI DR8-A2 used 3 minutes and 13 second to write the disc at 40x. Let us see how this compares to other drives;

The MSI DR8-A2 is a few seconds slower than the other 40x writers, but we guess you could wait those extra few seconds?

Write Quality:

We will test CD-R discs from a total of 7 different CD-R manufacturers. To really measure the write speed, we used the 'create data CD" function in Nero CD-Speed. The discs were written at the maximum speed that the drive supports. For the quality test, we used K-Probe 2 which is a tool developed by a Lite-On Employee. It runs under Windows and works with drives made by Lite-On. Also note that different drives and different reading speeds may affect the results obtained when scanning the discs. We used a Lite-On LTR-52246S drive with firmware 6S0F and scanned the discs at 48X speed.

A written CD-R disc will always have some C1 errors; C1 errors are easily corrected by the drive's error correction capabilities. The next level of errors is C2, while C2 errors could also be corrected by most drive's error correction capabilities; they are not wanted on a good quality disc. A good disc should not contain any C2 errors, and preferably have an average C1 error amount of below 2.0 for the best discs, or at least below 10.0 average for good quality discs. After C2 errors there are only un-correctable errors that will make a disc unusable.

Why wait any longer? Below are the obtained results:

CMC Magnetics is not known for making the best CD-R discs but the MSI DR8-A2 performed very good with them.

Very good, should not cause you any trouble.

No problems here either.

A bit high error level near the end, even a few C2 errors which is not so good.

Pretty good, but we have definitively seen it better with TY media. But there is no reason to worry as the error level is still very low.

Another very good result, we could easily recommend these discs.

We have found these Samsung CD-R discs, manufactured by Plasmon, to be of very low quality. And as we could see their C1 error count is a bit higher than for most other discs, but far from worryingly high, and there were no C2 errors. So all in all there should not be any problems in practical use.

CD-ReWritable:

The MSI DR8-A2 supports a CD ReWriting speed of 24x, let us see how this compares to other writers. Let us start with taking a look at the writing strategy it uses;

The MSI DR8-A2 uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writing technology to write at 24X for CD-RW discs, the average speed is 23.49x. This again seems pretty average compared to other drives, below are some other drives for comparison.

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.

And we did also write a disc in Nero Burning ROM, the compilation we made was 650Mb large and we wrote the disc with the Disc At Once write method.

The MSI DR8-A2 used 3 minutes and 50 seconds for writing the disc at 24x, let us compare this to some other writers;

Again there is a few seconds between the MSI DR8-A2 and the fastest competitors, but nothing that should annoy you in practical use. Let us now take a look at the CD-ReWriting quality. We again used K-Probe and same testing procedure as with the CD-R discs.

The result is not that good; we have a nasty error spike at the beginning which may cause trouble. Room for improvement MSI!

Low quality discs, and as we could see the amount of C1 errors is sky high and there is also a lot of C2 errors. Probably needless to say '? but the last part of the disc is unreadable.

Summary:
For CD-Writing it's pretty good and most discs written had a low amounts of errors, very good and it gets a plus in our book. But for CD-RW on the other side '? it get a minus in our book since both discs had too high error levels.

But after all, it's a DVD-Writer, so head on to next page and read about DVD-Writing performance and DVD media compatibility…

Reading Performance

DVD-Writing Performance