Sony DRU-720A: Speed Increases All Around

Write Time/Quality Test - DVD+R 16x Media

We have tested the DRU-720A with a variety of media types from a couple of different manufacturers. Our usual Ritek media selection has been updated to include the Ritek R04 16x media to test the high speeds of the newer drives. We have also included Verbatim's 16x MCC 004 media and Sony's own home-grown 16x D21 media, which was included with the retail package.

All three types of 16x +R media burned at an average rate of 11.95x. The drive began its write at about 6.67x and increased its speed to 15.98x-15.99x at the end of the write on the MCC 004 and Sony D21 media, while ending slightly slower on the Ritek R04 media at 15.95x, which is not a big difference. These three media are some of the highest quality discs on the market.

We did notice a short drop in speed when writing to the MCC 004 disc right before the 3.5GB mark. Let's take a look at the read back of the media in our Plextor PX-712A drive. We have been using the PX-712A as a standard to detect PI/PO errors on media written by our test drives.

From the above screenshot, we can see how well the DRU-720A wrote to the MCC 004 media. The abrupt drop in speed had no effect on the final quality of the write. The majority of the errors were detected at the end of the disk beginning just before the 4GB mark. This did not scare us, however, since PI errors are correctable and a total number of 65947 PI errors is nothing to worry about if spread out over the course of the media. The Ritek R04 media had the most PI errors at 174223, mostly at the mid-point of the disc. There were 0 PO errors on all three media samples that we scanned with PlexTools, which is great, but not surprising since the DRU-710A performed just as well.

Screenshots of the 16x media read and write processes in Nero CD-DVD Speed as well as scans with PlexTools have been compressed into a downloadable zip file: 16xplus.zip