When we tested the first 20x DVD burners last year we thought that the specific speed was way too high for reliable DVD recording. However, the 20x DVD drives appeared on the market and soon after them, some ODD makers pushed the speeds even higher with the release of the first 22x drives. Samsung, HLDS, LiteOn and Sony Optiarc were among them, with the latter to prepare for the release of an even faster burner that will offer recording at a blazing speed of 24x!

We have been always concerned about the quality of the recordings at the maximum available speed. The 22x speed speed is very high and controlling the burning procedure in order to maintain acceptable writing quality requires not only sufficient firmware engineering and drive design, but also discs that react well in the burning process itself and store data accurately. This means that in these discs should perform perfectly in beyond their their limits. Of course, ODD makers are aware of the strict requirements for 22x burning so they support this high speed using specific media only.

In this brief article we provide information about the way three of the latest 22x High Speed ReWriters perform when they burn compatible DVD recordable discs at 22x. These drives are the LG GH22NS30, the Samsung SH-S223F and the LiteOn iHAS422.

All the drives have been already presented through CDRInfo.com in the previous months, but for today's test we have updated their firmware to the latest available.

Drive	Chipset
HL-DT-ST GH22NS30 v1.02	Panasonic MN103SD9GRAB
LITEON iHAS422 v4L11	MediaTek MT1859LL
TSST SH-S223F vSB03	MediaTek MT1869L

For this test, we chose the following DVD recordable discs since they have generally shown high quality and reliability in the past and are also compatible for high speed burning:

• DVD+R
  • Taiyo Yuden YUDEN000 T03 000 (00h) 16x
  • Verbatim MCC 004 000 (00h) 16x
• DVD-R
  • Taiyo Yuden TYG03 16x
  • Verbatim MCC 03RG20 16x

  

The discs were recorded with data using the the Nero CD DVDSpeed "Create disc" function. Their readability was checked with a typical transfer rate test.

For the writing quality tests, we used the IQB Omni Analyzer from Quantized ( http://www.quantized.com).

Let's move on to the tests.