Labs

DVD writers

Each of the drives were installed in the same PC. To ensure that our results show the speed of each drive, rather than that of the software being used, we used the same version of Ahead's Nero 7 Premium DVD writing utility to test each drive. All the drives were updated with the latest firmware before testing and we tested each one with branded Verbatim and Memorex discs.

Our tests are designed to show the performance you can expect from each DVD writer when performing everyday tasks such as burning a video DVD from movie files that you've edited or backing up files from your hard disk. We filled DVD-R, DVD+R and double-layer DVDs with a set of 1GB and 100MB files similar to the contents of a video DVD disc. When testing rewritable DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs, we simulated a typical system backup by filling them with 4.4GB of smaller office and system files. We also timed burning an 80-minute audio CD.

After recording the time taken by each drive to finish each of our tests, we converted these times into a speed rating. This allows you to compare one drive against another, as well as compare the actual performance of a drive against the ratings quoted by the manufacturer.