It's that time once agains for the DVD burning speed wars to pick up speed as many vendors jump on the bandwagon to produce yet another high speed DVD burning optical drive. Case in point, LG sent over an 18X SuperMulti DVD-RW drive to the labs of PC.com for a review a run. Your truly got his grubby hand onto it soon as it arrived through the front entrance. When I dug it out of the box I expected the usual plethora of connectors. What greeted me instead were, to my delisght, two SATA port. For this review, I used two different Imation DVD-Rs, one Ritek DVD-R and one Mitsubishi DVD-R.
All the discs, which have a burn rating range of 8X to 16 X, had their entire capacity filled up. From the lot of DVDs used, the Imation DVDs locked in a record burning of 3 minutes while the Ritek and Mitsubishi ones scored a burn time of 5 minutes. Verifying and randomly checking the written data showed little to no write errors. At high-writing error, but with LG burner their none. That, in itself is surprising, since the memory buffer on the LG burner is a miniscule 2MB, Leading me to assume that there would be some writing erros when burning at max speed.
