Sony’s DVD Drive

This DVD drive from Sony has an IDE interface and conventional slide-out tray for inserting CDs and DVDs. The drive features 16x and 40x read speeds for DVDs and CD-ROMs respectively. The front panel has a volume control and headphone socket.

The drive comes with an analog audio cable to wire up to a sound card but does not come with any bundled software or drivers for certain DOS-based games or for playing DVD movies.

We compared the drive against the Pioneer 105SZ DVD drive with the same DVD and CD read speeds and buffer size. Transferring around 651 MB of data from a DVD to the hard disk took same amount of time in both the drives at an average transfer rate of 4.3 MBps. However, in case of same amount of data transfer from a CD-ROM, the Sony DVD took about 18 sec more than the Pioneer one. The average CD-ROM data transfer rate here was 2.3

MBps.

It is interesting to note that same amount of data is transferred faster in case of DVD even though the drive features 16x DVD speed as opposed to 40x CD speed. This is because while the ‘x’ in CD-ROM speed is 150 kbps, in DVDs, it is between 1200-1500 kbps. We also tried audio ripping using CD-DAE software. For about 59 min (15 tracks) of audio from an audio CD, the Sony drive took about 3 min and 52 sec, a minute lower than the Pioneer drive.

The drive supports CD-DA, CD-ROM XA, CDI, Photo CD, CD Extra, CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD-Video formats. It is a decent buy for home users. Office users can also consider buying one for installing software that now increasingly comes on single DVDs rather than bundles of CD-ROMs.

Shekhar Govindarajan at PCQ Labs