NU Europe was kind enough to send us their latest DVD-Writer; The NU DDW-081, we applied a firmware upgrade to make it dual format which changed the name to NU DDW-082. NU Tech is a very new brand on the market so we do not know what to expect from this writer. But we will discover more about this drive as we test it.

Also thanks to the NU engineers that listened to my problems and actually fixed a few of them in the B364 firmware used in this review, also notice that the B364 firmware is still under development and the support for DVD-R/RW is not yet fully implemented.

Also thanks to Memorex for providing some of the media used in this review.

Some short NU New Universe information:

NU is a very new brand name but comes from Quanta Storage Incorporated (QSI) the world leader in making slim optical drives for laptops. If you have a laptop there is a good chance that it has a QSI optical drive. Here is some company information found at their web page:

• Overview
  Nu Technology Inc. is founded in May of 2003 by Quanta Computer (one of the best Notebook IT groups worldwide) and Quanta Storage Inc. Located in the center of the Silicon Valley; we are an optical storage drive manufacturer. Our company is proud to produce a full range of both internal and external, Half-Height and Slim optical storage products. Some of our internal and external optical products include IDE CD/DVD ROM, CD re-writer, CDRW plus DVD combo drive, and DVD writers.
• Products
  In order to meet the fast growing demand of mobile storage devices, Nu Technology has developed the world's first slim DVD writer, and slim CDRW DVD combo drive.
  Our strong R&D department and large production capacity is the reason why we get ahead of our competitors and produce the world's fastest slim USB CDRW DVD combo drive.
  On top of all, Nu Technology also released the world's first 52X combo drive for both internal IDE and external USB interface.
• Mission
  Our mission is to be the leader and transform the industry with external slim drives that offer the most advanced technology, along with a user-friendly interface, and stylish exterior design.
  Nu Technology is dedicated to offer fast and excellent service to our customers. We stand behind our products' superior quality and their unbeatable prices
• R&D Focus
  NU has 161 employees, of whom about 60, or 37%, are in the R&D division. The R&D team is split into mechanical design, testing, and circuit design groups. Of the R&D team members, 40, or 67%, are dedicated to firmware development (versus 20-30 at other Taiwanese ODD producers), and 20, or 33%, to mechanical and hardware design.
• Product Road Map
  NU has been dedicated to developing slim-type optical storage disk drives. However, it will also engage in halfheight DVD-RW/Combo for desktop PCs to leverage its R&D resources and fully utilize its manufacturing capacity. In addition to HH ODDs, the company expects to launch portable DVD players in 2003 by providing engines (loaded with PCB boards) to Chinese distributors. However, we believe that the contribution from new products other than slim ODDs will remain small for the next two years. As slim Combo speed migration is likely to top out at 24x, the company aims to enhance the product features through ultra slim, slot-in, or even expansion into car applications, a segment now dominated by Japanese vendors.

Let us go directly to the specifications of the drive.

Drive specifications:

These are the specifications of this drive, found at the NU Global web page:

To us this table seems quite messed up and slightly misleading. One place there is 16x DVD-Reading performance mentioned as well as Mount Rainier (yes it states that F/W is not ready one of the places it's mentioned).

With the B364 firmware we use there is the following improvements/changes from the specifications shown above:

⋅         Now supports 24x CD-RW writing speed
⋅         Supports 4x DVD-R writing speed
⋅         Supports 2x DVD-RW writing speed

But there is still no Mount Rainier support, a bit disappointing since this drive was introduced in September 2003 so they have had plenty of time to add Mount Rainier support to the firmware. But there is light in the tunnel; NU plans to add Mount Rainier in a firmware that is going to be released in April.

Specification-wise it seems like a very good drive, but read on to find out if it really is.

Test machine:

For this review we will be using a computer with the following configuration:

Hardware:

⋅         Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8KNXP with Intel i875P chipset.
⋅         Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2,8GHz 800MHz FSB with Hyper Threading support.
⋅         RAM: 1Gb PC3500 DDR
⋅         GFX: ATI Radeon 9800 pro
⋅         Sound: SB Audigy 2
⋅         Hard disks: 2 x Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80Gb in RAID 0 on the i875P S-ATA RAID controller.

System set-up:

The NU DDW-082 was connected as Primary Master (Incorrectly shown by this picture due to an extra IDE controller in the computer) and identified itself as NU DVDRW DDW-082. DMA (Direct Memory Access) and autorun was enabled for all devices.

Software:

Windows XP professional is installed on the computer along with Service Pack 1 for windows XP. We will be using the following software in this review:

⋅         Ahead InCD v 4.1.5.10
⋅         Ahead Nero Burning ROM version 6.3.0.3
⋅         Ahead Nero CD/DVD Speed v2.11.4
⋅         Ahead Nero InfoTool v2.07
⋅         Slysoft CloneCD v4.3.2.2
⋅         Exact Audio Copy v0.95 prebeta 3
⋅         K-Probe v1.1.29

Head on to the next page and find out what's inside the box…