Pacific Digital U-30201 DVD±RW recorder - Page 12

DVD Recording Tests

- Writing Performance

The Pacific Digital U-30201 supports DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW writing. The maximum supported speed for DVD+R is 8x (6x~8x Z-CLV), 4x CLV for DVD-R, 4x CLV for DVD+RW and 2x CLV for DVD-RW media.

Currently, only a few 8x certified DVD+R media are available on the market. The supported 8x DVD+R media came from Mitsubishi Chemicals, CMC Magnetics, Ricoh and Taiyo Yuden.

8x DVD+R

An 8x DVD+R disc from Mitsubishi-Kagaku was used to check the 8x writing strategy of the drive. The software used was Nero CDSpeed with its "create disc" function.

The drive started writing at 6.11x. The resultant graph shown below, is the same as that produced by the LiteOn LDW-811S, where there was a slight glitch at the 1.25 GB address mark on the disc, with the drive's speed dropping and then rising to just a bit over 8x. Overall average speed was 7.49x.

The test was repeated with Mitsubishi 4x DVD-R and 4x DVD+RW media, and Fuji 2x DVD-RW media. The end results, presented in consecutive graphs further below, was a near perfect straight line on each occasion.

4x DVD-R

4x DVD+RW

2x DVD-RW

- Burning Tests

The best recording times are illustrated in the following table after burning 4315MB of data on various DVD±R, DVD±RW media, using the maximum allowed writing speed for each disc. For comparison, we also include the writing times for the LiteOn LDW-811S and Optorite DD0401drives. The Pacific Digital drive returned good overall times.

Mitsubishi 8x DVD+R media was burnt at 8x and gave the best writing time (8:22 min). The drive finished the same writing task with Ricoh 4x DVD+RW media in 14:41 min. With DVD-R media the time taken was 14.34 mins while for DVD-RW media the time required was 28.18 mins.

The following screenshots were taken from Nero, after successful burnings with Mitsubishi 8x DVD+R, Taiyo Yuden 4x DVD+R, and Ricoh 4x DVD+RW media. The amount of data is the same for all the tests.

• Mitshubishi Chemicals 8x DVD+R

• Mitshubishi Chemicals 4x DVD-R

• Mitshubishi Chemicals 4x DVD+RW

• Pioneer 2.4x DVD+RW

The table above presents the writing speeds of the drive for the various media formats.

- Packet Writing Tests