By Kire Terzievski, RMIT Test Labs
June 18th, 2002.
Editor's Choice
Editors' Choice: Ricoh MP5125A The Ricoh is very well priced, and if you only need a device to archive information then it would be the obvious choice. You can record onto DVD media at 2.4x and CD-Rs at 12x and CD-RWs at 10x. Another advantage it has over the DVD-RW drives is that you can append data to DVD+RW media. The Ricoh also didn't have the problem of taking forever to finalise a re-writeable disc. On the downside, we couldn't get it to read DVD-R or DVD-RW discs, though the vendor claims it can.
How we tested
The test bed for the DVD units was a Gateway AMD Athlon 1GHz PC with 128MB of SDRAM. All the DVD drives under test were IDE, and were configured as Master and connected to the secondary IDE port of the motherboard. The Lacie drive was the only exception, we had to connect it up to a FireWire card.Each DVD drive was tested with the software provided.
Each of the DVD+RW units were tested using re-writeable media (+RW). It didn't matter if we used +R or +RW media as these units can record at their maximum recording speed of 2.4x in either mode.
The DVD-RW units were tested using re-writeable media (-RW). This was somewhat problematic, because you can re-write (-RW) at 1x and write once (-R) at 2x. We were only able to run one of the tests (1.153GB audio file) at 2x and the rest at 1x. This was enough however to give us an idea of the speed differences between -RW and +RW drives.
Video Copy (1.153GB)
For our video test we recorded two 576.5MB AVI files for a total of 1153MB.
Audio Copy (353MB)
For our audio test we recorded a single 353MB WAV file.
Files Transfer From Desktop to Media (51.7MB)
This test involved copying a single file and a folder containing sub-directories with text files. We recorded all the contents of this folder and the single file and timed how long it took to record them.
Files Transfer From Media to Desktop (51.7MB)
This test involved copying a single file and a folder containing sub-directories with text files. We copied all the contents of this folder and the single file to the desktop and timed how long it took to transfer them.
CD WinBench
To test the day-to-day CD performance of the units we employed Ziff-Davis's CDWinBench 99 Version 2.0.
We also rated each drive in terms of interoperability, futureproofing, return on investment, and service.
Interoperability
We looked at the number of different formats the drive could write to and read.
Futureproofing
Market forces that are too difficult to predict will ultimately determine which format is most popular. As a result, we gave all these products relatively low scores.
Return on Investment
We looked at the price and took into account the bundled software and blank media.
8%
1%
