Pioneer DVR-109 Burner - Page 2

Transfer Rate Reading Tests

- CD Format

The Pioneer, due to its 40X supported speed for the CD format, was slower than the NEC and the Plextor drives.

- DVD Format

All the tested drives support 16X CAV reading speed with SL discs. Pioneer and Plextor seem to be the faster but the difference is negligible.

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. The ASUS and Pioneer drives once more exhibit similar performance. In this task, the Pioneer drive performed faster even than an already fast Plextor drive. Simply excellent reading performance...

The graph shown above indicates the reading performance for the drive with OTP dual layer media. 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 of 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. Once again Pioneer leads the race.

Here, NEC is the faster reader with the recordable formats, while Plextor with re-writable.

The performance for CSS DL media with the Pioneer drive is slow, since the drive includes riplock protection when reading CSS DVD-Video discs. This "problem" doesn't occur with the DVR-A09XL series or of course, with patched un-official firmware.

- DVD-RAM

The drive can read DVD-RAM but only at 2X CLV, according to the specs. For our test, we used a 5X DVD-RAM disc from Maxell burned with the LG GSA-4120B. The disc was read without any problems at 2X CLV.

-Appendix

Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

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