| Article Index |
|---|
| ASUS DRW-1814BL/T Internal DVD Writers, SATA vs. IDE Comparison |
| Page 3 - ImageBurn |
| Page 4 - Nero CD/DVD Speed |
| Page 5 - K-Probe Drive Tester |
| Page 6 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
There are many
optical drive manufacturers releasing Serial-ATA versions of the DVD writers recently, they all come with a price premium of around $25 on top of their IDE counterparts, but are they worth the extra cost? Today we look at
the current range of ASUS DVD writers, in both IDE and SATA format to find out. The results may surprise you.
The DRW-1814BL/T range of writers are ASUS’s new 18X speed DVD+/-R burners, as well as supporting speeds up 8X for Dual Layer, 14X speed for DVD-RAM and support for Lightscribe as well, so they have everything you need from a DVD burner.
DVD burners themselves are nothing new, nor exciting, just about every model on the market can write to all the DVD standards at around the same speeds, but now most manufacturers, including ASUS are offering Serial-ATA alternatives for their drives. The specs are exactly the same for both the IDE and SATA versions of the drive, the front of the drives also look exactly the same. So is the premium priced that is charged simply for the convenience of using a thinner cable? Or is there actually a performance difference? We thought we’d run a few tests.
The Test Machine:
- Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU
- Abit AW9D i975X Motherboard
- 2GB Corsair Twin2X PC2-8500 DDR2 RAM
- Seagate Barracuda ES 250GB Serial ATA-II-300 Hard Drive
- Antec Basiq 500W Power Supply
- Windows XP SP2
{mospagebreak title=Page 2 - DVD Decrypter}
The first test we have is using DVD-Decrypter to copy and decrypt a 7.35GB Dual Layer DVD movie:
As you can see, there is next to no difference between either drive in this case, however DVD-Decrypter relies quite heavily on the rest of the system to decrypt the files on the fly, so it’s unlikely to have maxed out either drive’s throughput rate.
Our next test is using Nero Burning ROM to write a full 4.7GB DVD-R disc in each drive. The data is made up of a large ISO file (left in ISO format) as well as MP3s and smaller files such as Microsoft Word documents and JPEG images.
Here we see a huge difference in burn times, with the IDE drive almost 3 minutes behind the Serial-ATA. I thought these results were odd, but after running 3 tests on each drive, it consistently showed the same results, so there’s no doubt about it. While watching the program write the discs (so very exciting) the IDE drive seemed to go just as fast as the SATA drive in the beginning but slowing down around half way through with the drive’s buffer level fluctuating rapidly. We can only hope some of the other tests can help shed light on this issue.
