NEC ND-3520A review @ CDRLabs.com

If you're looking for a fast DVD writer, the ND-3520A won't disappoint. Thanks to its 16x DVD+R and DVD-R writing speeds, the NEC's new drive took less than 6 minutes to write an entire 4.7GB DVD. This level of performance carried over to our rewriting tests where the ND-3520A turned in some very good writing times with both DVD+RW and DVD-RW media. For whatever reason though, the drive would not erase or packet write to DVD-RW discs at anything faster 4x. Writing to double layer DVD+R media wasn't a problem for the ND-3520A either. While it wasn't able to top the Plextor PX-716A, it took less than 27 minutes to burn an entire 8.5GB DVD. Unfortunately, due to the lack of media, we weren't able to test the ND-3520A's DVD-R DL writing speeds.

Of course, with a drive like the ND-3520A, writing quality and media compatibility are just as important as speed. With 16x rated discs becoming more abundant, finding compatible media really wasn't an issue with the ND-3520A. The drive wrote to most of our test media at its rated speed or better and was even able to write to some 8x rated discs at 16x. The ND-3520A's writing quality was also pretty good for the most part. However, there is still room for improvement, especially with Ritek's DVD+R DL discs.