detail information

What's inside the box?

On this page we will take a look at what the drive came shipped with, and take a look at the drive and its technology.

NU have picked mostly light colours for their box, but the content of the box is even more important than the look of it so we opened it up and took out the content:

Seems to be a pretty good bundle, but to make sure nothing is left out we list everything in the box below:

⋅         The drive itself
⋅         Audio cable
⋅         4 Screws
⋅         Application installation CD
⋅         Empty 4x DVD+RW disc made by Philips
⋅         Empty 4x DVD+R (capable of 8x with this drive) made by Mitsubishi Chemicals.
⋅         Quick installation/configuration paper
⋅         Quick installation guide manual

Not a bad bundle, as we have software and empty discs, but a thicker and better manual plus an IDE cable would be nice.

Now it's time to take a look at the drive itself:

The front sets this drive aside from most other drives, it has some slight curves and it has the play/next buttons that few drives have. After all it's a nice looking front bezel.

As we could see from the sticker on the drive, our drive was manufactured 9^th October 2003 at a factory in China. Seems like this drive has been forgotten somewhere since it's about 6 months since it was manufactured.

On the back of the drive there are from the left: unknown pins probably used for calibrating the drive at the factory; digital audio connector; analogue audio connector; pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master, and 2 reserved jumper positions; IDE connector and power connector. The back of the NU DDW-082 is completely identical to the back of Lite-On DVD-Writers, which is a bit surprising. But it's not a Lite-On manufactured drive and completely different in other ways.

We quickly installed the drive without any problems and here is a screenshot from Nero info tool:

Our drive came shipped with firmware BX02. Firmware B364 will be used in this review, this firmware changes the model name from DDW-081 to DDW-082 and adds DVD-R/RW support to the drive, and the upgrade to DVD-R/RW support is free - no additional charges like with some other brands such as BenQ. The drawbacks with this drive is that it does not support reporting C2 errors, and lacks Mount Rainier support. It does not support DVD-RAM reading/writing, but few drives supports this. We would also prefer a larger buffer than 2Mb.

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM:

We do not really find anything alarming here either, but a larger buffer and Mount Rainier support would have been nice.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the write technology used by the NU DDW-082:

CD-Recordable:

As we could see the NU DDW-082 uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 40x. This gives an average speed of 31.15x. Seems pretty good, but let us compare this with two other 8x DVD-Writers:

The NEC ND-2500A also 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.

For comparison we have made the following table: 

It uses the same amount of time as the Lite-On LDW-811S to write a disc at 40x - but lags behind the Plextor PX-708A with a few seconds

CD-ReWritable:

The NU DDW-082 uses P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) writing technology to write at 24X for Ultra Speed CD-RW discs, the average speed is 23.47x. But let us compare this to two other drives capable of ReWriting at 24x speed:

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. For a better overview we present the following comparison table:

As we could see the NU DDW-082 did very good and the only drive that used less time at writing the disc is the Plextor PX-708A.

8X DVD-Writing speed:

The NU DDW-082 uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,4Gb is done at 6x speed; last zone from 0,4Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x speed. This gives an average speed of 7.65x. The curve is bumpy due to the 'Running OPC" feature this drive have, this will be explained later in the review. But let us compare this result to two other writers as well:

The NEC ND-2500A uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,8Gb is done at 4x speed, the next zone from 0,8Gb to 2,2Gb is done at 6x speed and the last zone from 2,2Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x. This gives an average speed of 6.80x. The speed is the same for both DVD-R and DVD+R discs.

The Plextor PX-708A also uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,7Gb is done at 6x speed; the next zone from 0,7Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x speed. This gives an average speed of 7.69x, look below to see a comparison table:

We could see that the Running OPC feature slowed it down a tiny bit as it shifts writing speed earlier than any other drive we have reviewed, and without the running OPC feature it would have been clearly faster than the other drives. But it is still very fast and only beaten with 2 small seconds by the Plextor PX-708A.

Features and techniques:

Now it's time to take a look at the features and techniques of this drive:

Seamless link is developed by BenQ in co-operation with Philips. The reason why this drive incorporates Seamless link is that it uses a Philips Nexperia chipset. This is how the Seamless link buffer under run prevention mechanism works:

1. Monitors the amount of data that is buffered during writing.
2. Stops the writing process and stores the RecEnd address if there is any problem which causes the amount of data in the memory to drop below a certain level
3. Waiting on the Pause state and receiving new data to fill the buffer memory
4. Seeks the RecEnd address to find the exactly RecEnd point
5. Re-Start the recording process

Running OPC:

The drive also features running OPC (Optimum Power Control) while writing, you will see this as small bumps in the transfer graph in Nero CD-Speed if you use the 'Create data disc" function. This is another feature of the Philips Nexperia chipset. You will see later in this review if it really improves the writing quality or not. 

Changing book type tool (bitsetting):

This drive also supports bitsetting, which basically means that you may change the Book type of DVD+R/RW and special for this drive only you could also set the book type of DVD-R/RW discs to DVD-ROM. Some players do not allow certain types of recordable DVD media to be played and with this bitsetting trick you may change the Book type to DVD-ROM, now the discs are identified as DVD-ROM discs by the player and may play. You may download the bitsetting utility here. And here is a screenshot from the small program:

The utility is very easy to use:

-Start it and select the NU Drive you want to use from the dropdown menu.

In the left column it will tell you what it's currently set to.

Flash ROM: The setting stored in the flash ROM of the drive and will stay the same after a reboot.
DRAM: The setting stored in the DRAM memory of the drive, the setting in the DRAM memory will be erased/reset if you restart the computer.

In the right column you may choose the book type to use. The drive comes with book type for DVD+R discs pre-set to DVD-ROM stored in the FLASH ROM. If you want your settings to survive a power loss / computer restart you should tick the 'Enable Flash Ram save" box to save your settings to the Flash ROM. Notice: Do not change the settings in the flash ROM to often as the Flash ROM could be written to only a limited amount of times (Usually over 100 times tough, but if you change the setting every day you may run into problems pretty soon).

To verify that it worked we wrote several different discs. And tested them in DVDinfoPRO:

DVD-R:

DVD-RW:

DVD+R:

DVD+RW

As we could see, the bitsetting worked with all types of DVD-media that this drive supports writing.

Another quick test we did was to start Nero CD-Speed and look at the disc information:

The results were verified and all discs was show as DVD-ROM.

Bitsetting improved one thing for us: The NU DDW-082 has a problem; it creates DVD-R discs that do not work in some drives (examples of drives that do not detect the NU DDW-082 written DVD-R discs: Toshiba SD-M1612 and Pioneer DVR-106D), but if we set the book type of the DVD-R discs to DVD-ROM they will now work in the Toshiba SD-M1612 (still do not work in the Pioneer DVR-106D). So there is a small improvement. But the DVD-R problem is a firmware bug that we hope NU is able to fix soon, more on this later in the review.

Included software:

Now it's time to look at the included software, and comment it if needed. Notice that we may not use the included software in our performance testing part of the review.

CinePlayer:

The drive includes Sonic CinePlayer to play DVD and VCD movies. Not among the most used software DVD players but it worked just fine for us.

Sonic MyDVD 4.5:

This is the opening window of Sonic MyDVD.

And this is the creation window.

Sonic MyDVD is one of the easier programs we have used when it comes to creating VCD and DVD movies. Although we have not used the program very long it seems like NU made a good choice on including Sonic MyDVD.

Sonic RecordNow 6.5:

RecordNOW 6.5 is a very easy to use program, but in our opinion it also lacks some advanced functionality that programs like Nero Burning ROM have. But for a new user it's probably pretty easy to understand and use, which is positive.

Sonic DLA 4.51:

Sonic DLA (Drive Letter Access) installs, but is invisible until you right click on your writer, now you are able to see the format option.

Here you may select to do a full format or quick format. Sonic DLA is among the faster and better packet writing programs we have used. Notice that it may conflict with: Easy CD-Creator, DirectCD, Nero Burning ROM and InCD.

All in all the software collection bundled with this drive is quite good, and among the better bundles we have seen.

Now that we have finished examining the drive and its writing strategies it's time to head on to next page, which is reading performance test…