On the 26. Feburary, Sony has released the 2.0a firmware for the DRU-530A DVD±RW, which added 8x DVD-R and 4x DVD-RW writing speeds. CDRlabs.com took the chance to see how the
drive is performing with this new firmware and updated their Sony
DRU-530A review accordingly.
| Part of the update: The DRU-530A took about 9 minutes to write our test data to Verbatim's 8x DVD-R media. If you do the math, this is more than 4 minutes faster than when the drive wrote at only 4x. The new firmware also improved the drive's DVD+R writing speeds. By switching the writing method to P-CAV, Sony's engineers were able to shave almost 1:30 off the DRU-530A's writing times. The writing quality with Verbatim's new 8x DVD-R media was really surprising. I was expecting results similar to what we saw with their 8x DVD+R media. Instead, the number of PI and PO errors was actually very low. The writing quality with Verbatim's 8x DVD+R media was also much better than before. However, the PI and PO errors still got a little high near the end. So is it worth upgrading to the new 2.0a firmware? If you have access to 8x DVD-R and 4x DVD-RW media, there's no reason not too. The same goes with 8x DVD+R media. The improvements in speed and writing quality alone are worth it. Unfortunately, this new firmware still doesn't fix one of my original issues with the DRU-530A. The drive still doesn't have the ability to write to 4x DVD+R or DVD-R media at 8x. Hopefully Sony's engineers will see the light and add this feature in the near future. |
You can read the complete update here. Also don't forget to pay a visit to our Recording Hardware Forum.
Source: CDRLabs
