Optical storage has come a long way in the past few years. CD Burners were all the rage, and burn speeds went through the roof. But we soon realized that 700MB was not nearly enough room for all the data we had. Enter the DVD. DVD Burners, like their CD ancestors started out expensive and slow. But today we have faster burners for much lower prices. Today I am going to take a look at one of these new DVD burners, the ASUS DRW-1608P2. I’d like to give a big thanks to Directron.com / AxionTech.com for sponsoring this review and sending the drive.

Specifications and Software

Before I put the burner to work, let’s check out what it can do. This internal DVD burner boasts the following burn speeds:

• DVD±R up to 16x


• DVD+RW up to 8x


• DVD-RW up to 6x


• DVD±R Dual Layer up to 8x


• CD-R up to 40x


• CD-RW up to 32x

The burner can also:

• Read DVDROM Single Layer up to16x


• Read DVDROM Dual Layer up to 12x


• Read CDROM up to 40x


• Read DVDRAM up to 2x


• The drive claims access times are 130ms for DVDs and 120ms for CDs. The Buffer is 2MB.

Asus includes a large bundle of software in the box: Nero 6 OEM Suite and Ulead Movie Factory 4.0 Suite SE. The complete package of software includes:

• Nero Cover Designer


• Nero VisionExpress (Editing movies with menus and effects)


• Nero Media Player


• Nero Express


• Nero CD DVD Speed (Testing speeds)


• Nero DriveSpeed (Controlling spin down and read speeds)


• Nero InfoTool (Find Drive and System Information)


• Nero StartSmart (The full burning program)


• ASUSTeK Asus DVD (Watching DVDs)


• Ulead Movie Suite contains tools for burning, copying, erasing, authoring, shrinking and capture recording.

Test Setup

For all of my tests, the drive was installed as a slave to my Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM drive in my test machine:

• CPU: Athlon 64 3200+


• RAM: 1GB PC3200 DDR


• Hard Drive: Western Digital 80GB


• Operating System: Windows XP Professional

I used the following media throughout my testing:

• Verbatim DVD+R 16x


• Verbatim DVD-R 16x


• Verbatim DVD+R DL 2.4x (Approved for High Speed Burning at 4x)


• TDK DVD+RW 4x


• TDK DVD-RW 4x


• Generic CD-Rs

Tests
For all of my burn tests, the data will come from a disc image ripped to my hard drive. Using Nero, I ripped the image from a single layer DVD disc that totaled 4.29GB.

For my tests, I will burn each type of media, test CD and DVD read speeds using Nero’s own Speed Tool and test ripping speed for both CDs and DVDs. Finally, as the drive supports high speed burning, as well as Over-Speed Burning, I will also test if my 2.4x and 4x media will burn at higher speeds.