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:

The MSI DR8-A2 reached 40x by a small margin, to see how this compares to other drives, look below:

The MSI DR8-A2 came out as the slowest reader, but it has some impressive seek times beating all the other drives in that area.

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.

Again a good result, look below for a comparison table.

Same here as well, it came out as the slowest drive, but on the other side it has some fantastic 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 full 40x. The result seems to be perfect, let us compare it to other drives below.

Pretty good result, and the seek times is a lot better than for the other drives.

Audio '? Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the MSI DR8-A2, 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:

Still a bit behind the other drives, but guess what? The seek times is again perfect.

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 MSI DR8-A2 did very well and came out with perfect scores, it do also support all extra-features.

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 reads single layer DVD-Video discs at almost 12x speed and dual layer DVD-Video discs at 8x speed. How this compares to other drives may be seen in the table below.

For single layer discs it's pretty fast, but not the fastest, but for dual layer discs it very fast and is beating all the other drives. It's also nice to see that the drive do not have any speed limits for reading DVD-Video discs, like some competitors have.

 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 DVD+RW. That is pretty normal for most new drives.

It came out as the fastest drive we have tested so far, which is pretty nice.

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.

Again it's the fastest drive, very good!

Overall thoughts:

Overall the drive did pretty well in our reading tests, it wasn't the fastest drive in all tests, but it has proven to be a stable reader for all types of discs, and coupled with some amazing seek times we are quite pleased with it.

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

Installation and features

CD-R/RW Writing performance