Another review today comes from our friends of CDRLabs.com. This time they review a drive from a brand that gains more and more populairty, Asus. As one of our moderators from our CloneCD Forum calls them, SafeDisc cutters.
The drive uses P-CAV as writing strategy has the usual technology to prevent buffer underruns and to determine the right speed for media. CDRlabs was satisfied with the performance of the drive, but it's overall performance was not impressive:
Part of conclusion: |
With its long list of features and 16x rewriting speeds, the ASUS CRW-4816A has the potential to be one of the top 48x writers on the market. Unfortunately, the drive currently has a few nagging problems that might keep it from reaching this goal.
In our tests the CRW-4816A was able to reach some very impressive speeds when reading pressed and CD-R discs. But its CD-RW read speeds were limited to only 32x. Most of the other 40x and 48x writers we've tested have been able to read CD-RW discs at 40x or higher. On the other hand, the CRW-4816A's DAE speeds were very good. In some of our DAE tests the drive was able to even top the Lite-On LTR-48125W, but had a very hard time reading scratched and dirty audio discs.
The CRW-4816A's writing performance wasn't as good as it could have been. While the drive had the highest average writing speed we've seen, it took a few seconds longer than some of the other 48x writers to complete our tests. While a few seconds difference isn't really much to write home about, the drive isn't as media-friendly as some of the other 48x writers either. Media that worked fine at 48x with some of the other drives was not able to write consistently at 48x with the CRW-4816A. The CRW-4816A also had a problem with writing quality. Most of the discs I recorded on the drive were full of errors and in a few cases they could not be read back at all.
If you would like to read the entire review, then go here.
If you would like to more about SafeDisc cutting go here.
Source: CDRlabs.com
