CD Recording Tests

- CD-R Writing Tests

The BenQ DW800A supports 12x, 16x and 24x P-CAV writing speeds. Below you can see the CDSpeed writing simulation graph with a 48x CD-R media from Taiyo Yuden.

As can be seen from the screen shots on the left and below, the drive began the virtual burning at a speed of 18.21x. After the 15:00 min mark of the disc, the BenQ drive reached its maximum supported writing speed of 24x, continuing to the end. The average speed was 23.52x. The test confirms the manufacturer's specifications for 24x CD-R writing.

- Recording Times

For this burning test an 80min data compilation was created with Nero Burning Rom, and then recorded at the maximum speed on a 700MB disc. In the table above you can see the time needed by each drive at its maximum supported speed, to burn the disc. It should be noted that amongst the three drives used for comparison in these tests, only the BenQ supports 24x writing. The two other, LiteOn and Optorite, support 40x. So, as would be expected, the BenQ drive was the slowest, although not by much, and certainly not by enough to justify the reputation and ascendancy of 40x drives.

Below are the best writing times for the BenQ drive at supported speeds for CD-R's, 12x, 16x and 24x. The disc brand and type used was the same for all speeds (Taiyo Yuden). In each case, the Seamless Link feature was enabled.

The following graph shows the recording times with different media brands, recorded at the maximum speed of 24x.

- CD-RW Writing Tests

The BenQ DW800A supports 10x CLV maximum rewriting speed, with High Speed rewritable media. In the following graph we can see the resultant output after writing on a 12x US-RW disc from Asus.

The test maintained a steady speed at around 10x with a final average speed of 9.96x

Below we compare BenQ DW800A's rewriting capability with that of the Optorite DD0401 and LiteOn LDW-811S drives.

Due to each drive's supported speed (10x) and hence as would be expected, the BenQ drive was the slowest, requiring double the time in comparison with the other two drives in order to complete the same task.

- Packet Writing Tests

We used InCD and a 10x HS-RW disc from Mitsubishi Chemicals for all packet writing tests. The formatted disc had 530mbs of free space. We copied a 403 MB file (403.147 KB) from the hard disk (on the same PC as the writers) to the formatted RW media through Windows explorer (drag and drop).

- Other features