Sony DRU500A

Last month's review of Sony's ground-breaking multiformat DVD+/-RW drive was slightly stymied by the non-availability of high-speed media for the '-' format discs - '+' format media availability was fine. Our testing software Nero Burning ROM only permitted us to use the top speed allowed by the media we had to hand - which was 2x for DVD-R and 1x for DVD-RW - when the drive is rated twice as fast as that with these formats. However, we've now managed to get our hands on some 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW discs from first4media.com, so we've retested the Sony to see if it could live up to its performance claims.

Mostly, we found it did, although it couldn't write a multisession disc to either media type, which hadn't been a problem with the slower media we used last month. Using a 4x DVD-R disc, the Sony burnt 1GB of mixed files in five minutes, 22 seconds for an average write speed of 3.23MB/sec, equivalent to around 3x. With 2x DVD-RW media, the DRU500A wrote the 1GB files in eight minutes, 34 seconds. This equates to 2.02MB/sec, which is about right for 2x.

However, a significant portion of this was taken up writing the lead-out - 37 seconds for the DVD-R and almost a minute for the DVD-RW - plus some lead-in time. So the drive is likely to show better performance when writing a larger file set. Overall, the Sony DRU500A not only covers you for the majority of formats but also delivers on its performance promise and so retains its Recommended award and goes on our A List.