The Memorex 16X is a fast reader, offering good seek times. The drive supports 48X reading speed for CD/CD-R which is now the standard for almost all DVD burners, while it also supports 16X reading speed for DVD+R and DVD-R formats, the highest available. The drive was already loaded with firmware version 1.A3, which was the latest available at the time of this review.

When it comes to CD error correction, the reported performance was average, where with the ABEX TCD-726 test media, while most of the latest drives gain a perfect score, the Memorex could only manage 82.6%. In DVD error correction, the performance was satisfactory and the drive managed to completely read all of the tested media, at quite high reading speeds.

The drive in our DAE tests, confirmed its 40X reading speed but unfortunately did not manage to read the 90/99min test discs. This may be due to the fact that the Memorex 16X is equipped with a NEC chipset and as far as we know until now, none of the NEC drives are capable of reading these media...

Most of the latest drives are able to bypass all the tested AudioCD protections and the Memorex 16X was no exception. Similarly, in games protections, as with most drives, the Memorex 16X was unable to make working back-ups of the latest Safedisc protection schemes, so we do not recommend this drive for games back-ups.

The CD-R at 48X writing speed is considered too high to expect good quality and the Memorex proves us right with the exception of Verbatim media, which in our Clover Systems tests reported excellent quality. But, we recommend lower burning speeds for safer results.

The Memorex 16X supports high writing speeds for DVD±R media, with near excellent burning quality for most of the DVD+R brands, whereas with DVD-R, the speed graphs according to LiteON CDSpeed fluctuated, and in some cases the drive failed to completely read the media. Fortunately, for the same media, no errors were produced with the Almedio AEC-1000, which reported good writing quality. Nevertheless, the writing times for 16X and 8X are a little bit high, but keep in mind that this also happened with NEC drives... ;-)

As for the booktype setting, we noticed that the booktype cannot be changed with Nero Burning ROM, but we could change it with CDSpeed. A firmware revision may fix this.

The suggested retail price, according to Memorex, at the time of the review for the drive was US$79.99.

- The Good

- High DVD±R/RW reading/writing speed
- 6X DVD-R DL and 8X DVD+R DL support
- DVD error correction capabilities
- Can burn DVD+RW media at 8X, and DVD-RW media at 6X
- Supports audio protected discs
- Writing quality with most media
- Retail package

- The Bad

- Performance with 90/99min Audio CD's
- Cannot create working backups of the latest SafeDisc protected games
- Cannot overburn DVD recordable media

- Like To be fixed

- Writing quality with specific media

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features