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The DRW-8800 is a 8X DVD+/-RW drive. As is typical of drives with 8x speed
today, it’s capable of writing 4X DVD+ or – RW, 8X DVD+ or – R,
32x CD-R, 16x CDRW, It reads as a 16x DVD, 40x CD, 8X DVD +/- RW etc (it’s
in the chart above). I kind of wish that the drive would write as a 8X DVD+/-
RW but truthfully 8x DVD +/- RW media is scarce. I went to a local Best Buy,
a Circuit City, and a Office Depot finding only 4x DVD +/- RW media so it shouldn’t
be a big negative.
The drive has 2 MB of cache, which is much higher than my first DVD drive
which had 512 KB of cache. As a DVD RW, this is a typical amount of cache that
most RW drives have today. The other specifications are also typical of RW
drives of this speed and generation. The average seek time is excellent and
the drive supports reading of all the different media available for DVD and
CD.
Test System
3.0 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood
AOpen i875P motherboard
All In Wonder 9600XT video card using Catalyst 4.4
DRW-8800 DVD drive
120 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0b
Onboard Sound
Using a DVD+RW disc, Nero’s CD Speed utility recorded a speed of 4.13x
speed on the average. This is virtually exactly what the drive is rated at,
with some difference due to the usage of 1.08 GB instead of the 4.7 GB capacity
of the DVD. The rating for seek was 130ms which is only a bit above the rated
speed of the drive. Burning a 4 GB file onto the DVD took about 18 minutes
including data verification and testing of the disc 9 minutes for the burning,
8 minutes for the data verification and 2 minutes for the ancillary programs
to run the tests.

I was able to obtain a 8x DVD+R media for the review. Unsurprisingly, Nero’s
CD Speed showed an average speed of 5.75x and a maximum speed of 7.60x for
this DVD-R. The 7.60x is near the maximum speed of reading a DVD+R disc and
near 6x average speed is pretty decent. I’m rather happy with the performance.
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