A Well-priced DVD

The Asus DVD-E616 is rated at 16x DVD and 48x CD read speeds. The drive can handle various types of media including Audio CD, CD-ROM, CD-I, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD and DVD. The drive has an IDE interface, so it’s pretty easy to install. Its front panel has two buttons, one for play/skip and the other for stop/eject. It also has a headphone jack and a wheel volume control to listen to audio CDs directly, if you have connected the audio cable to your sound card. The drive comes with a comprehensive manual that guides you through hardware installation and troubleshooting. Also included in the package is an AsusDVD CD that has software for DVD playback.

We used DVDSpeed and CDSpeed tests to check out the maximum as well as average transfer speed of the drive while running DVDs and CDs respectively. The drive read DVDs at a maximum of 12x, which is lower than its rated 16x. However, average speed came out to about 11.5x, which is very good. However, note that DVD movies are played at 1x only, and the extra speed is useful only for forwarding or skipping through movie scenes or for transferring data from a DVD to your PC. As far as CDs go, the drive gave us a maximum transfer rate of 36x, that is, about 5.4 MBps, again lower than its rated speed of 48x. However, the drive was zippy in recognizing new discs, taking only 9 seconds to do so, and would take less than 2 seconds in loading up or ejecting after spinning down. Overall, a price tag of Rs 5,000 is quite good for this drive.

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs