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.

The drive we have is an Engineering sample, so it's the bare drive. It came shipped to us in a huge box with lots of shock absorbing stuff. Since it's a sample drive there is a sticker telling us that it really is a sample drive:

Hopefully there is no hardware difference between this drive and the shipping version of the drive. So we hope that our tests are representative for the shipping version as well.

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

The front has not changed significantly since the earlier models, quite simple and boring if you ask us.

As we could see out from the sticker on the drive, our drive was manufactured in December 2003 at a factory in China. When looking at the serial number it seems like our drives is the 59^th first drive produced of this model, so it's a very early manufactured drive.

On the back of the drive there are from the left: unknown 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.

We had some installation problems where the drive conflicted with our test computer, luckily these problems were fixed with the 1.10 firmware recently released. And here is a screenshot from Nero info tool:

Our drive came shipped with firmware 1.05. Firmware 1.09 and 1.10 (most tests is done with 1.10) will be used in this review. One of the benefits with this drive is the ability to read DVD-RAM discs. According to Nero info tool this drive is unable to read CD+G discs, it also lacks Mount Rainier support and DVD-RAM writing support. And we would like to see a higher CD-R write speed as well as a larger buffer.

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 Pioneer DVR-107D:

CD-Recordable:

As we could see 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. This seems a bit slow, so 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: 

We can clearly see that the Pioneer DVR-107D is the slowest writer, due to its 24x write speed.

CD-ReWritable:

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, again let us see how this compares to two other drives:

As we could see the NEC ND-2500A uses CLV, (Constant Linear Velocity) write method to write at its rated speed of 16X for Ultra speed CD-RW.

The Plextor PX-708A, with its P-CAV (Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) write speed of 24X for Ultra Speed CD-RW disc,s 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 there is a large difference between the various writers with the Plextor PX-708A being the fastest and the NEC ND-2500A being the slowest.

8X DVD-Writing speed:

The Pioneer DVR-107D uses Z-CLV, (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity). The first zone from 0-0,6Gb is done at 6x speed; last zone from 0,6Gb to 4,4Gb is done at 8x speed. This gives an average speed of 7.72x. 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:

The table shows that highest average write speed does not always mean lowest writing time, as the Pioneer DVR-107D has the highest average write speed, but is still barely faster than a Lite-On LDW-811S for writing times.

The drive we got was a sample drive so no software was included. So let's go directly to the reading performance tests…