Tom's Hardware: The latest DVD burners true speeds

December 29, 2005

Juhuslik used our news submit to tell us that Tom's Hardware has come to the rescue for those out
there confused by the "alphabet soup of the different standards and the
disparity between vendors claims and true speeds" which they feel can
be a bit of a hindrance when searching for a new burner. Whether you
feel that way or not, it's fun for us to look at the tests and the procedures
they use as they try to unravel the mystery for us. The purpose of the tests was
to reveal the true speeds of the devices and to do so with a variety of medias.

Here is a snippet from the conclusion:

As you
can see from this review, problems continue in terms of media availability
for DVD writers - perhaps more than ever. To burn write-once DVDs, you
have no choice but to go with DVD+R if you want to take advantage of the
highest writing speeds - it'll take a little more than five minutes to
burn a disc with the SDR-5472 from Toshiba. For rewritable DVDs, speeds
remain limited to 4x for both standards (- and +) but DVD+RW still manages
shorter burn times. The NEC was the winner here, at a little over 14
minutes, but the Toshiba took only three seconds longer.

As for dual-layer writing, there's no contest, since
we weren't even able to find DVD-R DL media available for sale. You'll
have to settle for DVD+R DL. The Sony writer came out on top with a burn
time of a little over fifteen minutes.

Juhuslik had this to say:
"A strange test, because the tested writers: NEC ND-3540A, Pioneer DVR-110D,
Plextor, PX-740A, Sony DRU-810A and Toshiba SDR-5472". In case you would like to
go over to Tom's and take a look at the review, you can do so by following this link.

Source: Tom's Hardware