40x CD Writer Shootout - PAGE 1

2002 is possibly the best year so far for CD burning. Twice this year we’ve seen some serious advances to burning speeds – and now the average drive being pushed by manufacturers is a sizzling 40X (with the 48X speed burners already being released by some pioneers). These new 40X drives don’t come with a huge price premium either – you’ll find them for around $30-50 more then for a 24X or 32X burner.

So just how fast is 40X burning? The spec rates it at 6,000Kb/sec, or under 2 minutes for a full, 650MB burn! On top of this, the CD-RW speeds are now at 12X – which was the max burn speed of the high-end drives only half year ago. Now that’s some serious progress.

Z-CLV Takes it Further

The Zone based burning technology (Z-CLV) introduced for 24X drives is still the key to the increasingly faster drives. The improvements with the newer drives enable the very last burning stage to hit 40X speeds – but the basics of ZCLV remain intact. Each of the drives uses this type of method to reach high speed burns, which is why you won’t actually see the theoretical 2 minute 640MB disc – the burn process only reaches it’s full 6000Kb/s burn rate in the last quarter of the burn, when the drive head is at the outermost portion of the disc. ZCLV allows higher speed burns, but the actual performance of a 40X drive using ZCLV is not going to even be close to double the speed of a 24X drive. What you will see, though, is a measurable and appreciable improvement over 24X and 32X drives.

Fast, but safe… and quiet

By the way, even with the increase in speed, you won’t be making any extra coasters or anything – Burn-Proof, JustLink, huge buffers (a la Samsung) and other such related methods are all good protection against buffer underun errors. And the most surprising thing of all – these drives are quiet, very quiet. Even when burning at full 40X speed, the drives are even more quiet then older drives burning 12X or so– a welcome relief considering the worry of the noise to speed ratio of mechanical devices.

Media Considerations

The faster you burn, the more your burns will be relying on the quality of the media used. Not all media is made equal, and currently there is little media which explicitly states it is good up to 40X. What most people are finding, is that discs rated at lower speeds are still good up to 40X. Most drives will be able to detect and adjust the maximum burn speed allowed on different media types, and most of the manufacturers also recommend certain brands for highest reliability and 40X compatibility. CD-RW discs also will have different reliabilities. In our tests for example, the Plextor drive refused to burn at 12X speed on high speed media rated up to 10X unless we tricked it into doing so. And even then, the burn times would be around the speed of a 10X drive.

All of the drives we tested had upgradeable firmware, and some of the firmware updates indicate improvements in either burning speeds or media recognition and compatibility.

In our tests, the lack of media rated explicitly for 40X CD-R burns and 12X CD-RW burns were a major concern, so we asked manufacturers to supply or recommend media types for testing. In the end, we used the unbranded, 12X media that came with the MSI drive for our CD-RW tests, and unbranded 32X (high speed) media for our 40X burn tests.

If you are unsure what media to use, don’t worry. Most manufacturers will list actual recommendations. For instance, Samsung recommends using Ricoh, RCC, Ritek, CMC, PRODISC, PRINCO and BEALL discs for CD-R burns.