Drives Compared:

AOpen DRW4410 4x DVD+R/RW

Teac DV-W50D 4x DVDR/RW

Common Hardware:

Asus P4P800S-E (I848P)
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800 MHz FSB)

512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR

20GB Western Digital ATA100 HD

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro

On-board AD1985 SoundMax audio

Standard Floppy Drive

Windows XP Professional SP1

Utilities and Media Used For Testing

SiSoft SANDRA 2004
Nero InfoTool
Nero CD-DVD Speed
Nero Burning ROM 6
Music Match 8.0 for MP3 Encoding
Media Used:
-Memorex 48X CD-R
-TDK 4x DVD+R

4.3GB of AVI files for DVD Data Tests
Daredevil DVD for DVD Movie Tests
698MB AVI File for Sandra's CD Test
702MB of MP3 files for CD Data Tests
Shania Twain "Up!" Audio CD, 73:06 in length used for CD Audio Tests
Crystal Method "Tweekend" Audio CD, 68:53 in length used for MP3 encoding

Nero InfoTool can give us a quick reference screen showing the various reading and writing capabilities of CD and DVD drives. We've opted to take screenshots comparing the AOpen DRW4410 and the Teac DV-W50D 4x DVD burner that Jeff reviewed back in August.

Starting at the top, we can see that the AOpen drive boasts of slightly faster CD Read and Write speeds, while the buffer size remains equal at 2MB a piece. The two drives are also listed on the opposite sides of the fence, with the AOpen DRW4410 showing DVD+R support, and the Teac as DVD-R, although the Teac drive is technically dual format.

The two drives are also very similar when comparing the list of supported read features. Each checkbox relates to one format that each drive can properly read from. The DRW4410 has one edge over the Teac DV-W50D in that it supports the CD+G format, usually used for Karaoke CDs. Obviously, when it comes to supported writing modes, the Teac DV-W50D has the DVD-R and DVD-RW boxes checked, which the AOpen drive does not. Neither of the two, however, support Mount Rainier technology, for dragging and dropping files to the DVD drive.

For another quick and easy comparison, we ran the CD/DVD-ROM benchmark from SiSoft Sandra 2004. To run these two tests, we needed two discs that had large files on them. We used a CD-R with a single 698MB AVI file for the CD Data test, and likewise a DVD with multiple large AVI files totaling 4.3GB. Each disc was read, benchmarked, and then a score was shown comparing the performance to other drives in Sandra's database.

The AOpen drive's score here looks to be right on with the top score from the database, even though it is technically rated with a CD Read Speed of 40X. In fact, when we look at the benchmark breakdown, we can see that Sandra actually listed the drive as a 17X drive. Even worse, the Teac DV-50D is shown at 14X, and it's drive index falls well shy of the database score for a 32X drive. As we've reported before, it appears that even the latest version of Sandra reports the beginning speed of the drive rather than its peak rating. We can also see that the average access time is 1.5 times greater on the AOpen DRW4410 than the Teac DV-W50D.

In the DVD Performance test, we saw little gain for the AOpen DRW4410. The drive index only moved up an additional 60 points. This was a paltry amount when compared to the Teac DV-W50D, which jumped up 800 points or so. The performance edge when reading DVD discs squarely goes to the Teac drive, which again posted much lower average access times.