- CD Format

Reading speed for both pressed CDs and CD-Rs is very good, almost reaching the Plextor PX-716A. The Pioneer burner was the slowest.

As with pressed CDs and CD-Rs, so too with Ultra-Speed ReWritable media, the reading speed was good, slightly lower than the Plextor drive.

- DVD Format

All three burners can read single layer media at 16x, so the reading speed of all three drives is very similar. Speed differences are not significant here.

The two layers of a PTP DVD-ROM disc are read sequentially with the drive starting reading from the inner part of the disc, which is the beginning of each layer, progressing towards the outer range for each layer. Again, all three drives performed in a similar way, since their reading speed for this type of media is the same.

The first layer of an OTP dual layer DVD-ROM is read exactly the same way as the first layer of the PTP disc we tested previously. The difference here is the reading strategy of the second layer on the disc. The beginning of the second layer is located in the outer part of the disc, so the drive starts reading from the outer tracks towards the inner part of the disc. It should be noted that this new NEC model can read this kind of media faster than any former NEC model, reporting almost the same speed as the other two burners.

The ND-3530A shows its teeth with DVD-R/+R and DVD-RW/+RW media. It is the fastest of the three drives here and in this case, the speed difference is significant. The NEC burner reached almost 12x reading speed with write-once discs, while the Plextor PX-716A and the Pioneer DVR-109 burners could only achieve 9x~9.5x average reading speeds.

Most optical storage enthusiasts would already know about the "rip-lock" function that NEC uses with all their burners. This makes the drive very slow when ripping DVD-Video. The Plextor burner dominates the comparison chart with an outstanding 13329kb/sec ripping speed.

-Appendix

Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

• CD Pressed / CD-R / US-RW
• DVD Pressed SL / DVD Pressed DL / DVD-R / DVD-RW / DVD+R / DVD+RW