With the majority of the new DVD burners to support the 20X burning speed for recordable DVDs, consumers are often concerned about the quality of the recording when they choose to burn at the maximum available speed.

According to our hardware tests until now, burners normally support 20X burning only with selected DVD recordable media. And that because this speed is very high and controlling the burning procedure in order to maintain acceptable writing quality requires not only sufficient firmware engineering and drive design, but also media that react well in the burning process itself. This means that in most cases, these discs should perform perfectly in their limits.

In this brief article we provide a comparison of some of the latest High Speed ReWriters and some of the most common 20X compatible MIDs.

The drives that we are going to be using in the tests are illustrated below. All of them have been reviewed in our labs over the previous months.

Drive	Chipset
LG GSA H55L	Panasonic MN103SC7GRT1 704U6F28 2
OPTIARC AD-7200S	NEC MC-10044
ASUS DRW2014L1T	Mediatek MT1899LE
PIONEER DVR-215BK	NEC MC-10042
SAMSUNG SH-S203D	Mediatek MT1859L

and the MIDs:

• DVD+R
  • Taiyo Yuden YUDEN000 T03 000 (00h)
  • Verbatim MCC 004 000 (00h)
• DVD-R
  • Taiyo Yuden TYG03
  • Verbatim MCC 03RG20

The specific discs were selected among the numerous available DVDs in order to ensure that they will be widely accepted for 20x recording.

All of the drives are flashed with the latest firmware available, so that they are expected to offer the best possible performance.

The discs were recorded with data using the the Nero CD DVDSpeed "Create disc" function. Their readability was checked with a typical transfer rate test. The the DaTARIUS Analyzer 2X was also used to measure each disc's writing quality.

Let's move on to the tests.