SONY DW-G120A

Review Pages

- CD Format

For our CD transfer rate tests, we used the Nero CD-Speed utility and a set of Pressed CDs. Lets take a look at how the drive performed as compared with the other two drives.

Both the Sony and Pioneer drives are 40X CD readers while the Plextor drive supports 40X and so, was faster in this test.

With RW media, the maximum reading speed is 32X for the Sony and Pioneer drives, while the PX-760A is once again fastest, supporting a higher reading speed of 40X.

- AudioCD

In the case of AudioCDs, all three drives support 40X DAE speed and all succeeded in getting a 100 score in the DAE quality test.

- 90mins Audio disc

- 99mins Audio disc

The Sony DW-G120A cannot read 90 or 99 min audio discs.

- DVD Format

Now let's have a look at how the drive performs with DVD media. This time, a set of DVD media was used, both SL and DL.

All drives support up to 16X reading speed with DVD Single Layer media. The Sony DW-G120A however, was slightly faster but the speed differences between the drives 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 its outer range. The Sony is a slow reader in this test because it only supports 8X reading with DL media, while the other two drives are12X readers for this DL format.

The above graph shows the reading performance of 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. The performance with this media was more or less the same as in the previous test.

The supported reading speeds for DVD±R/RW media, are very important, since these are the most common formats. The Sony DW-G120A supports up to 16X for DVD±R and 12X for DVD±RW. The Pioneer drive only offers 8X maximum reading speed support for RW media so it was expected to be slower.

Slow ripping speed was reported with the Sony DW-G120A, while the other two drives reported faster DVD ripping speeds.

- DVD-RAM

The drive can read DVD-RAM at 5X P-CAV. 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.