And yes another new review from our friends over at CDRLabs.com. This time they've taken a look at the latest drive from a company called Artec. The drive they reviewed is the WRR-4848 model, offering write and read speeds of 48X and re-write speeds of 12X.
After Jason's rave review of Artec's 32/12/48 CD-RW, I expected the WRR-4848 to be the next budget wonder. While the drive had some of the fastest CD read speeds we've seen and a good number of features, its slow writing speeds and questionable writing quality keep it from being one of the top 48x writers we've tested. |
Due to a slow average writing speed, the WRR-4848 took quite a bit longer to complete our writing tests than most of the other 48x writers we've looked at. Unfortunately, the drive was also slower than some of the 44x and 40x writers. If I had to put my money on the reason for this, it's probably because the drive uses Z-CLV to reach its maximum speed. Most of the 48x writers we've tested have used CAV or P-CAV. The WRR-4848's media requirements were also quite high. Media that worked fine at 48x with other drives wouldn't write at this speed with Artec's 48x writer. The drive also created its share of writing errors with a couple types of media. Hopefully Artec can improve the writing quality and the media requirements in a future firmware update.
Artec's 48/12/48 CD-RW performed much better as a reader. In our tests the WRR-4848 had no problems reading all types of media at 48x and had some pretty good seek times to boot. The WRR-4848 also did very well in our DAE tests. It had no problems ripping audio CD's at 48x, but did not read scratched and dirty discs as well as I would have liked.
The Artec WRR-4848 gets an overall unimpressive score of 7. Interested in reading the complete review? Then check it out here.
Source: CDRLabs.com
