HP's DVD Writer is a solid and speedy drive, although it is expensive. Read our Australian review.
As DVD writers continue to get cheaper, it's only a matter of time before they replace CD-RW drives as the standard internal drives on most desktop PCs.
Before that happens, though, the stoush concerning DVD writeable formats will have to be sorted out. In the meantime, consumers can opt for drives that support one of the existing two formats, or multi-format drives like Sony's DRU-500A drive. While HP's DVD Writer 300i doesn't replicate the 500A's dual-format writing tricks, but it can teach the multi-format drive a thing or two when it comes to writing in a speedy format.
Installation of the 300i is made quite simple with the inclusion of a setup poster and CD containing an installation video. This we found a touch odd--we suspect most consumers opting for an internal drive will either know how to fit such drives already, or will entrust that job to somebody who does. If the concept of messing around with internal drives fills you with terror, HP also sells an external version of the 300i, the DVD Writer 300e. It's an identical drive in an external Firewire and USB 2.0 compatible casing, although it does cost AU$799, compared to the 300i's AU$649.
The one odd thing we did note during installation is that our test drive was jumpered as a slave drive. On almost any system, you're going to want to have the drive jumpered to the master channel to ensure fastest possible data transfers, so quite why it would come out of the box this way mystifies us. As with any jumper, it's trivial to change as long as you do it before you've screwed the drive into the case.
The 300i is capable of burning at 4x/2.4x/10x with DVD+R/+RW media, and isn't a slouch for CD burning either--it's suited up to 16x for CD-R and 10x for CD-RW. That's a fair bit beneath most consumer CD-RW drives, but quick enough for most users.
HP's approach to most consumer IT products is to wrap all the software up in a central launching application, and that's exactly what you get with the 300i. An application simply called "HP DVD Writer" acts as a launch platform for DVD diagnostics tools, ArcSoft Showbiz DVD (for creating video discs), RecordNow (for data discs) and Simple Backup (which is pretty self-explanatory).
There's nothing stopping users from just manually launching their choice of software, however. HP's own included software is a bit kludgy if you want a lot of options, but given the drive's clear pitch to the mass consumer market, that's no great surprise.
As a 4x DVD+RW burner, we were expecting good things from the 300i, and for the most part we weren't disappointed. The 300i managed an average 3.75x write speed for DVDs across in Nero DVD Speed, which indicates that the 4x designation isn't just marketing hype.
The 300i's write speed translated into some decent testing results. Copying 910MB of test files to the drive using DLA took 4:49; that's a healthy 3.1MB/second. HP's DLA utility replaces the in-built tools of Windows XP and only works with the 200 and 300 series drives, so it's not possible to use it for reading from other drives, which is a touch restrictive. The 300i also did well in our read tests; transferring the same 910MB of files back to a hard drive took 3:35.
Our test video discs ran perfectly in every DVD player we popped them into, although as with all DVD-writeable media, the only way to know if you do support plus or minus formats is to drop a disc in and see what happens. HP maintains a Web site listing of currently compatible drives here.
The DVD Writer 300i is a solid and perfectly acceptable drive, although whether consumers are better suited to play both camps and go for a multi-format drive is still an argument with some weight behind it. If you're happy being solidly in the +R/RW camp, the DVD Writer 300i is a reasonable buy at the current price, although there are cheaper 4x burners on the market. With the competition in DVD burners being as fierce as it is, we wouldn't be surprised to see price drop before very long at all.
HP DVD Writer 300i
Company: HP Australia
Price: AU$649
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 13 47
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