Pioneer DVR-108 DL Recorder - Page 2

Transfer Rate Reading Tests

- CD Format

The Pioneer and ASUS drives have almost the same reading performance with pressed, CD-R and US-RW media, with the ASUS drive being slightly faster but by a very small margin of 0.05X. Both drives read US-RW media at 32X, which is rather slow by today's standards.

- DVD Format

All the tested drives support 16X CAV reading speed with SL discs. Again, there is very little between the drives, with the fastest being the BenQ and the slowest the Pioneer where the difference in average speed with the ASUS DRW-1604P is only 0.02X. With DL media, the Pioneer

The two layers of a PTP DVD-ROM disc are read sequentially with the drive starting reading from the inner part of the disc, which is the beginning of each layer, progressing towards the outer range, for each layer. The ASUS and Pioneer drives once more display similar performance.

The graph shown above indicates the reading performance of the drive with OTP dual layer media. The first layer of an OTP dual layer DVD-ROM is read exactly the same way as the first layer of the PTP disc we tested previously. The difference here is the reading strategy of the second layer of the disc. The beginning of the second layer is located in the outer part of the disc, so the drive starts reading from the outer tracks towards the inner part of the disc. The average reading speed was 9.40X, with a perfect reading graph.

Both the ASUS and Pioneer drives performed according to their specifications for 12X CAV DVD±R and 8X CAV DVD±RW discs.

The Pioneer couldn't read the CSS DL media at 12X and the average ripping speed drops to 5825Kb/s.

- DVD-RAM

The drive can read read DVD-RAM but at only 2X CLV, according to the specs. For our test, we used a 5X DVD-RAM disc from Maxell burned with the LG GSA-4120B. The disc was read without any problems at 2X CLV.

-Appendix

Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

• CD Pressed / CD-R / US-RW
• DVD Pressed SL / DVD Pressed DL / DVD-R / DVD-RW / DVD+R / DVD+RW