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 drive reached its rated speed of 40X before slowing down a bit at the end. We compare it to other DVD-Writers in the table found below:

The drive did not do to well, as only the Lite-On LDW-811S is slower, it also has the highest seek times of all drives.

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.

Nothing changes here and the result is about identical to reading the pressed disc. The usual comparison table is found below.

It did better this time and is about as fast as the other drives capable of reading at 40x speed. But the seek times is still not as good as with most of the other drives.

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 is locked at 32X reading speed for CD-RW discs; look below to see how this compares to other drives:

Like most of the other drives, it's locked to 32x reading speed for CD-RW discs, and again the seek times is in the higher range.

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Mediagear, 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, but the reading curve is very bumpy. We do not know why the reading curve is bumpy, but it was the same for every audio disc and it does not seem to affect extraction quality.

We can't complain about the speed, as it's nearly as fast as the fastest of the other drives, but again, seek times need improvement.

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed as expected in the burst mode test, but it was very slow in the secure mode test and is actually among the slower drives for secure extraction.

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 extracting quality should be very good, but we could see that it does not support reading data from lead-in and lead-out. This may give trouble with reading certain protected audio discs.

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. Notice: Even if some of these discs contains DVD-Video they are identified as DVD-ROM discs for some reason or another, it's a disc issue and not a drive issue, we did several tests and this does not seem to affect the results of the tests in any way.

As we can see, the reading speed for DVD-video discs is locked to 5x CAV for DVD-Video discs. Just for comparison here is some test results from single layer DVD-ROM discs:

The drive had a hard time reading the disc (Baldur's gate DVD-ROM), but the disc should be in good condition and no other drives have problems reading it. But it did reach 12x at the end, with a full disc it would probably reach a speed near 13x.

*Notice that newer versions of CD-speed actually report the highest speed as the end reading speed for the dual layer disc.
**Notice that the disc contains a bit less data than the disc used with the other drives, this is because the Pioneer DVR-107D was not reading the default test disc correctly.

It lags behind most of the other drives due to the lower reading speed of only 5x CAV for DVD-Video discs.

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 both DVD+R and DVD+RW, we had a hard time finding discs that the drive would read without any slowdowns. The results shown here is the best results we were able to get, with most discs there were severe slowdowns.

The drive is actually the fastest DVD+R reader and would have been the fastest for DVD+RW as well if it had not slowed down.

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:

Again we had a hard time finding discs that it would read without slowing down, and the results shown are the best results we were able to get. Below is a comparison table:

If you provide the drive with good quality discs it's the fastest drive out of all the tested drives.

DVD - DVD-RAM:

Since this drive supports reading DVD-RAM discs we of course tried that as well. Very few drives support reading DVD-RAM, so we did not have many results available for comparison. We had serious trouble getting it to read DVD-RAM discs, we tried a total of 5 different discs, writing/erasing the discs and so, but finally we found a disc that it recognized and was able to read:

The drive read the DVD-RAM disc at 2X CLV (Constant Linear Velocity), how this compares to the two other drives is found in the table below:

It's the slowest drive out of all drives, but we could live with that. But the reading/recognizing problems we had should be fixed.

Overall thoughts:

The reading speed for CD-RW discs and DVD-Video discs is lower than for most drives, but beside this the reading speed is quite good. But one major problem is that the drive is very picky when reading discs. On many discs (Especially DVD discs) we got an error message like this one:

And this happened on most types of discs, but we had most of the problems with original pressed DVD-Discs and DVD-RAM discs. All the problematic discs seemed to be in good condition and other drives read them perfectly. Hopefully a firmware in the future may be able to fix the reading problems.

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