detail information

The Pioneer DVR-107D supports writing Ultra-Speed CD-RW discs at 24x speed. It supports writing DVD+RW and DVD-RW discs at 4x speed, notice that 4x DVD-RW discs are not yet sold so we did not have any available for this review.

Re-Writing data:

For this test we set up a new compilation containing 650Mb of data in Nero Burning ROM. We used the DAO (Disc At Once) writing method. In the screenshot below you can see that the burn process completed successfully.

The Pioneer DVR-107D used 4 minutes and 9 seconds for writing the disc at 24X, let us compare this to some other writers; The Plextor PX-708A used 3 minutes and 39 seconds to write the disc and the Lite-On LDW-811S used 3 minutes and 44 seconds to write the disc. This makes the Pioneer slightly slower than the other two drives.

And here is the writing time for writing 4.4Gb of data to a 2X Memorex DVD-RW disc:

The drive used 29 minutes and 22 seconds to write the disc at 2X. Compared to the NEC ND-2500A (used 28 minutes and 31 seconds to write the disc) and the Lite-On LDW-811S (used 29 minutes and 25 seconds to write the disc). This makes it nearly a minute slower than the NEC ND-2500A but about as fast as the Lite-On LDW-811S.

And finally here is the writing time for writing 4.4Gb of data to a Ricoh 4X DVD+RW disc:

The Pioneer DVR-107D used 14 minutes and 28 seconds to write the disc, as a comparison the Lite-On LDW-811S used 14 minutes and 13 seconds and the NEC ND-2500A used 13 minutes and 52 seconds. This makes the Pioneer DVR-107D the slowest drive out of these three.

CD-RW Packet writing:

Now it's time to take a look at the packet writing performance of the Pioneer DVR-107D. We used Ahead InCD to write 401 MB (421 003 264 bytes) data to the disc.

Again we ran into packet writing issues and had to switch back to Nero InCD as the Pioneer DVR-107D did not work as expected with Sonic DLA 4.51. As we could see InCD is faster at formatting the disc. The average write speed of the Pioneer DVR-107D is just as expected.

DVD-RW/DVD+RW packet writing tests:

We used Ahead InCD to format and write 2Gb (2 217 820 160 bytes) data to the disc.

There is really no difference in DVD Packet writing performance and all drives performed very well.

Writing Quality with Re-Writable discs:

Due to request from our readers we will add a few write quality tests with Re-Writable media. Settings and testing procedures is the same as used earlier in this review so you may want to go back and read them if unsure. All discs used for these tests have been written to before, but none have been written to more than 25 times.

CD-ReWritable media:

The Pioneer is not good at CD-RW writing. After writing to a brand new Verbatim CD-RW 3-4 times, the Pioneer will be unable to write to the disc again (WRITE ERROR - MEDIUM ERROR), and we had to take a new disc, which also worked 3-4 times before it failed with the same error message.

In case you wonder: yes this disc type is unreadable by all drives after written by the Pioneer DVR-107D. Pioneer has a job to do with fixing these CD-RW writing issues.

DVD+ReWritable media:

Not the best result we have had with this disc type, but the disc is still read good enough. Remember that ReWritable discs are a bit harder to read than Recordable discs.

Even if it's not the lowest amount of errors we have seen on this disc type there is no problems reading the disc. Recommended.

This is also a disc type that we could recommend for use with this drive.

Disappointing to see discs from such a large manufacturer not being supported. The drive was unable to detect the disc. As a note: the older brother Pioneer DVR-106D does not have any problems with this disc type.

DVD-ReWritable media:

The amount of errors is relatively low and there are few reading problems so we have no problems with recommending this disc type.

A slight slowdown at the end is nothing to complain about. Highly recommended.

The drive was unable to detect this disc type. A bit disappointing since the same discs work fine in the Pioneer DVR-106D. But we have to agree that Princo is low quality, as few drives work correctly with them.

To sum it up: The drive has some serious problems with CD-RW discs that need to be fixed. It's also disappointing to see that some DVDRW discs that are supported by the older Pioneer DVR-106D are not supported by the new Pioneer DVR-107D.

Before we round off this review, let us run the drive through some advanced tests at next page…