iDVD is another story altogether you can burn a DVD directly from iDVD only if you have an internal Apple SuperDrive. You just can’t use Apple’s Disk Burner software, iTunes, or iPhoto to burn discs. When we copied 655MB of data that had been burned to a dual-layer disc, the Plextor was quite a bit faster than the rest, finishing the task in just 1 minute and 15 seconds, probably owing to its 8MB of cache memory (all the other drives have 2MB).Īt present, OS X doesn’t recognize any of the drives included in this review, but each drive comes with software that lets you use it with OS X. We also tried copying data from the external drive to our Mac to test the drives’ read speeds.
So if you plan to use the dual-layer feature often, you’ll definitely want to buy a burner rated at 4x for dual-layer burning. The Sony and Iomega drives are the exceptions: they are rated at 2.4x for dual-layer burning and took almost 44 minutes to burn a disc. The fastest dual-layer media available at press time are rated at only 2.4x, but the drives rated at 4x for dual-layer burning can actually burn these 2.4x discs at 4x speeds, taking about 27 minutes to burn an 8.5GB disc. The Plextor took nearly two minutes longer. The Sony took about three and a half minutes longer to burn 4.7GB to the same media using USB 2.0. We also spot-tested USB 2.0 write speeds using the Sony and Plextor drives, which offer both USB 2.0 and FireWire. The Plextor, Kanguru, and LaCie drives were a tad slower, but three drives-the EZQuest, the OWC, and the Iomega (due to its slower, USB 2.0 connection)-took considerably longer to write the disc. The Sony drive was the fastest when burning 4.7GB of data to a 16x-rated DVD+R disc, at just 5 minutes and 56 seconds. Because all current Macs include FireWire, which is as fast as or faster than USB 2.0, we tested all the drives except the Iomega using FireWire. Each of the drives we tested claims to burn a single-layer DVD at up to 16x, and all the drives have FireWire ports, except the Iomega, which has only a USB 2.0 port. The speed at which a drive will burn a DVD depends on three factors: the drive mechanism’s speed, the speed of its connection to your Mac, and the disc’s rated speed. All the drives we looked at can write to both DVD+R and DVD-R media, as well as dual-layer media (also called either DVD+RW DL or DVD+R9). Though it may be confusing, the upside to this heated rivalry is that it keeps the price of media down and speeds up development of new features. One group will come out with media and promise faster DVD-write speeds, and the other will soon follow or jump ahead. They do the same thing, and both are compatible with most home-entertainment DVD players and with the DVD drives in many computers. In the world of DVD burners, there are two competing standards groups that create two types of blank DVDs: DVD+R and DVD-R.
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