BenQ DW800A DVD+RW - Page 12

DVD Recording Tests

- Writing Performance

The BenQ DW800A supports 8x DVD+R and 4x DVD+RW recording.

We used an 8x DVD+R disc from Mitsubishi Chemicals, in order to check the 8x writing strategy of the drive. The software used was Nero CDSpeed, and its "create disc" function.

By taking a look at the screen shot below, it can be easily seen that the BenQ drive has the same DVD+R writing strategy as the Philips DVR824P and CyberDrive DX082D recorders. This is due to the fact that all three drives use the same chipset (Nexperia).

According to Nero CDSpeed, the writing process started at 5.34x and ended at 8.06x. The average burning speed was 7.41x. This number confirms in practice the 8x DVD+R writing ability of the BenQ drive.

Below is a screen shot from CDspeed, during a writing test with 4x DVD+RW media from Mitsubishi Chemicals.

Once again the drive confirmed the manufacturers specifications of 4x DVD+RW writing. The whole process showed that the drive is capable of stable 4x DVD+RW writing.

- Burning Tests

We burned 4315MB of data on various DVD+R, DVD+RW media, at the maximum allowed writing speed for each disc. The best recording times are illustrated in the graph below. For comparison, we also include the writing times for the Optorite DD0401 and LiteOn LDW-811S drives.

The BenQ drive was the fastest at DVD+R writing with Optorite the slowest. In DVD+RW writing, LiteOn proved fastest with the BenQ and Optorite drives slightly slower at almost the same times.

• Mitsubishi Chemicals 4x DVD+RW

Because of the Seamless Link feature, which was enabled during all tests, the BenQ drive adjusts the recording speed proportionally for the inserted blank DVD disc. In the following table are the maximum permitted writing speeds with media we tested and also their code IDs.

- DVD+RW Packet Writing

BenQ DW800A supports packet writing with DVD+RW and DVD+RW media. To test the performance with DVD+RW media, we formatted some Ricoh 4x DVD+RW discs and started the drag'n drop process, using a 412MB (412.822Kb) file. With the background formatting in full progress, we measured the reading / writing performance.

The performance of the drive is illustrated in the table below: