Asus DRW-24B1ST review (also applies to DRW-24B1LT)

line

There's not a whole lot to say about DVDRW drives these days, but every now and then someone comes asking which one is good, so I thought I'd share my findings. I hope it helps someone out there. Smile

The DRW-24B1ST is the most recent model in Asus' DVD writers lineup. It is listed alongside the Lightscribe-enabled DRW-24B1LT variant. Other than this feature, they're probably the same.

Why I chose it

- Asus says it conserves power.
- It comes in a retail box, whereas most other drives are bare, providing better protection during transit.
- The bundle includes Nero software.
- I couldn't find a Pioneer drive locally.

Here, I compare it side-by-side with my Pioneer DVR-216D on a G31-based computer running Windows XP. Firmware version was 1.01 on the Asus and 1.09 on the Pioneer.

Bundle

The drive comes with a printed manual, a utility disc, and a set of screws. You do not get a SATA data cable or an extra front panel.

As for Nero, in the past I liked the OEM editions that I received with retail drives. Nero Express 6 and Nero 7 Essentials sported a clean, polished interface, and included all the features my users needed. In contrast, Nero 8 Essentials fails to deliver. It is heavy, less intuitive, and less functional.

Nero 7 Essentials. (If you have a problem getting your copy to work under Vista, try this tip.)

Nero 8 Essentials. You can't create audio CDs with it.

Physical Dimensions

The Asus drive is 17cm long. The Pioneer is 1cm longer.

Power

In my experience, optical drives draw 2W (AC) at idle. With the Asus drive I saw a 1W drop. Nice! I repeated the test on another system to make sure.

The utility disc includes an Asus E-Green application. It's not a low-level driver, or a background program. Just a small window which tells you how much power you save. I don't know whether it communicates with the drive to obtain actual data. Either way, it didn't work for me, so I uninstalled it.

Tray load time

I loaded a Vista DVD and pressed the button to close the tray. I then counted the seconds until the disc's label appeared in "My Computer."

Asus: 15s.
Pioneer: 17s.

DriveSpeed v3 support

The Asus drive responds well to DriveSpeed's throttling commands, but the Pioneer drive does not. Instead, it uses an intelligent algorithm that varies the spindle speed to match the actual read rate. This helps create a quieter out of the box experience.

That aside, the program's spin-down timer setting has no effect on either drives.

Spin-down behavior

Once you stop accessing the drive, it is up to the firmware to decide how long it wants to keep the media spinning and ready for immediate access before stopping the motor.

The Asus drive maintained full speed for 30s, then fell back to a reduced speed mode for another 1.5m before spinning down.

The Pioneer drive behaved differently. If the disc was loaded and not accessed at all, it would spin down after 30s. If the disc was accessed, it would continue to spin at low speed for another 10 minutes (yep) before finally giving up.

Tray behavior

Some drives retract the tray automatically when you boot the system, a practice which I personally find very hostile to the user. Thankfully, the Pioneer drive never does that, not even on a hard reset. The Asus drive, however, attempted to retract the tray several times during the boot phase.

Vibration

Both drives vibrated very little during operation, even at high speed, but the Asus drive was clearly superior in this regard.

DVD-Video

I played back a pressed DVD-Video disc in VLC media player. The Pioneer drive operated at what appeared to be x4 speed, and was very quiet and unintrusive. The Asus drive was noticeably louder at x6, but could be throttled down to x4 manually with DriveSpeed. At that speed, it was as good as the Pioneer.

Performance

I used ImgBurn to create an .iso image from a pressed Vista install DVD. The Asus drive completed this 2.87GB job in 3:48s, while the Pioneer took 5s longer.

Once again, Pioneer's intelligent firmware came into play, as the task started off at low read speed, and geared up a few moments later.

quaglian · Joined: 05 Dec 2009 Posts: 1 Location: CHANDANNAGORE

How can I extract an ISO file to an external hard drive using Nero 6? I would like to extract the Windows 7 ISO to an external hard drive using Nero 6 but I can not figure out how to do this. I was able to do it with the trial of Undisker but I'd like to know how to do it with Nero.
_____________________
keyword research ~ keyword tool ~ keyword tracking ~ affiliate elite