Sony DW-u14a

I’ve had this DVD+-rw drive for a few months now and it has performed great, I have never had a failed burn with this drive.

The speeds:
burning: dvd: 4x -r/rw, and 2x+r 2.4+rw. CD: R-24x, RW-10x
Reading: dvd 8x, cd-32x
Buffer 8meg
(OS system used in : Windows)

Package:
This drive came packaged as OEM (not retail box), mine came with DVD burning and viewing software – I’m not sure if this is standard or if the store threw it in. The software CD included – DVD Maker Gold Suite, it has software technology from Ulead, CyberLink, Real, and NTI. All of which are major players in DVD read/write software.

While it’s nice to see support software included with hardware I buy, it was quickly tossed as I have my own preferred software.

The drive:
This drive is very stable and burns CD’s and DVD’s as effortlessly as a knife slicing through butter! I’ve experienced many CD/DVD drives over my years, a lot seem to have problems reading and writing, they claim to have fast speeds, but yet many drives have trouble with CD’s and DVD’s, often dropping the speed to attempt to read an area of the disc better. This drive has not been like that at all, and I’ve been very impressed with that factor. Drives that have to drop their speed, often waste a lot of time trying to ramp the speed back up.

As all newer drives, this drive also features an ‘anti-buffer under-run’ technology which prevents under-runs when burning to both CDs and DVDs.

The only issue and disappointment I have with this drive, is that it doesn’t burn to any CD-RW that is has a max speed of 2x. This drive’s CD-RW speed starts at 4x. It can however read my CD-RW 2x discs that I have burned on another burner.

While this drive can burn up to 4x, keep in mind that a DVD holds 120mins of video (or approx 4.7gig). This means that burning a full DVD of 120mins at 4x will take approx 15mins. So using a 2x DVD will take approx 1/2hr to burn 120mins. But if you think of how much data is being stored to a single, it’s not that bad of a deal.

Playback:
Both CDs and DVDs written in this drive can be played back in this drive, as well as used in home CD and DVD players. Please note that many factors come into play when playing back burnt CDs and DVDs in other devices. Things such as the media itself, ie: brand, speed, etc. type of CD/DVD player, features (dvd/vcd, etc). Some newer home DVD players also now playback DVD-RW which is a great way to test the movies you make if your doing video transfers, as things don’t always look the same on the computer as they might on your home DVD player. Check your CD/DVD player manual for more details regarding this topic.

Software:
I use Nero 6 (full version – not included with drive) to burn both CD’s and DVD’s, I’ve been using Nero for some years now and find it to be the best software around for burning. I’d recommend Nero for anyone who has a burner. For those who found Nero to be difficult to understand in the past, they have since upgraded it and it also has a ‘wizard’ style burning menu as well.


Conclusion:
I really have no bad things to say about the performance of this drive, except for the fact that it doesn’t burn to 2x CD-RW discs. But that could easily be overlooked because of the fact that it takes approx 45mins to burn a complete 2x CD-RW that is only 650megs, and in that time you can burn a full DVD+-RW at 2x and have time to spare...

As I am writing this, I noticed some x8 burners come on the market, while faster sounds better, remember the newest items are always more expensive. That means, you would be paying more for the burner, and also more for the 8x blanks. I also don’t like the idea of rushing into buying the ‘newest of the new’, as from experience, if you give it some time your not faced with being the one getting stuck with items that may not be quite up to snuff. Usually when an item such as a computer component comes out, they will revise it over time, and the ones who paid top dollar are more like guinea pigs in the end.