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The Quest for a DVD-ROM Reader After acquiring my A05 drives I wanted to use the best DVD-ROM drive for reading my DVD backups. So I carried out a few tests on the most popular drives to find the best. The results were very mixed and no drive was the best in all aspects of reading with different types of media. Ones that were good at reading one type of media were bad in other ways.
Click on the links to see screenshots for each test mentioned.
The drives I tested were:- LITEON 163
- LITEON 166
- SAMSUNG 616
- NEC 5800
- TEAC 516
- PIONEER 106
- TOSHIBA M1612
- TOSHIBA M1712
The first test: read speed of a dual layer dvd video.
The Pioneer and the TEAC both came out equal first with an average of 8.4x, peaking at just over 11x.
And last in this league came the Toshibas with an average of 3.54x, peaking at under 5x.
The second test: read speed of a poor quality pressed single layer DVD.
Here the Liteon, NEC and Samsung were the fastest readers with averages of between 11x & 12x.
With the Toshibas being the slowest averaging 3.47x. If, however, we view these results as DVD readability, then the Pioneer comes out tops with a perfect graph whereas the NEC, Liteon and Samsung show read problems.
Now how do they fair with various DVD media?
First a good 4.37gig DVD-R.
The Liteon came out tops here with the 166 averaging 6.6x and the Toshiba 1612 came last averaging 3.56.
Second a DVD-R with errors at 80%.
Here the Toshiba M1612 was the only drive to read this disc flawlessly and the Pioneer 106 failed to read more than 1gig.
The results for DVD+R media are different again with the NEC reading these the fastest and went off the scale at over 16x with a final speed of 16.33x.
The Toshiba's were again the slowest but had a smooth graph.
Vivistar DVD-R media that is no longer produced is slightly thinner than most and gave me player compatibility problems. The speed readings are similar to the other DVD-R but noticeably the readability is unstable with most except for the Toshiba and, surprising, the Liteon 166 would not recognise the disc. I had the same problem with the 163 until I updated the firmware so a future update may cure this.
Conclusion
In conclusion the fastest reader for DVD-R is the Liteon 166 with the slowest being the Toshiba 1612 but the Toshiba is the best drive at reading poor media. For ripping the Pioneer is the fastest at reading dual-layer with the Liteons, NEC and Samsung being the fastest at reading a single-layer DVD Video. Also, the Pioneer could read a bad disc better as could the Toshibas, which were slow sloggers. | Monday, March 10, 2003 Reviewer: Flashhits: 9000 Page: 1/8
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