Single Layer DVD Burning
First up, DVD+R and DVD-R burning. The drive supports a maximum of 16x for both of these types of media, and the media I have is 16x, so naturally I burned these discs at 16x. The time difference between formats was negligible here, only 12 seconds. And remember, this is less then 6 minutes to copy over 4GB of data, very impressive.
Next up is DVD+RW and DVD-RW. I was disappointed that I could not burn +RW at 8x or -RW at 6x, as the box claimed. Both of these were limited to 4x. Updating Nero did not help, and there was not a firmware update available. So these times are at 4x speed. Again, a very small difference in times between formats, at just over 15 minutes each.
CD and Dual Layer Burning
Next, let’s take a look at CD Burning. DVDs may hold more data, but my walkman can’t play them. I burned both a 70minute Audio CD and a 650MB Data CD. Both burns were at the drives maximum speed, 40x. The time differences were negligible here too, with only a 7 second differential.
And last but not least, the biggest burn of them all. DVD+R Dual Layer. Dual Layer discs, as the name implies, can store twice as much data on the disc due to a second layer of recordable space. DL discs can hold up to 8.5GB of data. So to test out the drive, I made a backup disc of my music, videos, documents and photos for a total of 8148MB of information. Even though my media was only rated for 2.4x, Asus did come through with its overburn claims here. Nero gave me the option of 2.4x, 4x, 6x and even 8x. I was slightly worried about data corruption if I used 8x on 2.4x media, so I went with a safer, but still faster, 4x. The drive copied all 8.1GB of data in only 27:54. Less then 30 minutes to burn all of that information was very impressive.
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