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

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