Product Reviews

Sony's snappily named DRX-820UL is a FireWire and USB 2-equipped external optical read-write drive. It's billed as being for Windows and only comes with Windows software in the box, but it performed admirably with Mac burning software from Apple and Roxio. It can also handle more DVD formats than you can shake a stick at. Because there are so many formats and speeds to list, we'll get them out of the way now, so bear with us.

This product burns DVD+R and DVD-R at up to 16x; DVD+R DL (Dual Layer) and DVD+RW at 8x; DVD-R DL and DVD-RW at 6x; and DVD-RAM at 5x. For CD writing, it burns CD-R at 48x and CD-RW at 40x. For plain reading, it runs CDs at up to 48x and DVDs at 16x. To put this into some kind of context, the SuperDrives in the latest Power Mac G5s read and write the regular DVD-R format at the same 16x, but lags behind on most other counts - CD-R and CD-RW burning are 32x rather than 48x and 40x, while DVD+R DL burning is 6x rather than 8x. And the SuperDrive reads but doesn't write to DVD-RAM at all. Of course, all this assumes your media is capable of being written at those speeds. This isn't necessarily the case, so keep this in mind when buying media and burning data.

Real-world tests give the clearest picture of how well a product actually performs, so we used a Power Mac G5 to record 500MB of data (100 MP3 tracks) onto various different disc formats. With a DVD-R disc, the DRX-820UL managed 500MB in two minutes 40 seconds, including lead-in

ADVERTISEMENT

and lead-out times, while for CD-R, it delivered the goods in two minutes 45 seconds.

Just because the drive supports a format doesn't mean it's necessarily good for all possible uses. The Sony drive took 19 minutes to copy our 500MB to a DVD-RAM disc, achieving an average of a little over 26MB a minute, or less than 500KB/sec. This is really down to the medium's inherent speed limits rather than the drive itself.

We also tested the drive with iDVD 6 and a Mac mini with no SuperDrive, and it was recognised by iDVD and recorded DVD without any fuss. The video asset encoding part of the DVD production process took a while on the Mac mini, of course, but the actual burning speed wasn't a problem.

The drive supports FireWire, but refers to it as iLink. It comes with a USB cable for USB 2 connections, and a FireWire cable with a standard FireWire 400 plug on one end and the smaller camcorder-style four-pin plug at the other. The drive itself has both the four-pin and standard six-pin FireWire sockets on the back, so there's no problem with connecting this to your Mac. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide bus power, so pocket FireWire drives, iSight cameras and other devices that require bus power won't work daisy-chained from this unit.

That small quirk aside, we were very impressed with this optical drive. It's fast, looks good, and worked seamlessly with the Disc Burning features in the Finder, iDVD and Disk Utility, as well as with the richer feature set of Toast Titanium. It's even happy to work vertically as well as horizontally - it comes with a vertical stand, and small tabs in the disc tray held our media in place in the open tray even when the desk was given some serious jolts.

The Sony DRX-820UL matches or out-performs the fastest SuperDrive, but if you have one of those now, you'll be unlikely to want to get this as well. It makes an admirable replacement if your optical drive is playing up, though, and if you don't have DVD burning abilities in your Mac right now, this is an excellent way to get it all in one go.