CenDyne DVR-104 DVD-RW EIDE drive

CNET editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.0 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jon L. Jacobi
• Reviewed on: 04/14/2002

CenDyne's DVR-104 DVD-RW drive is the latest version of the DVR-103, the Pioneer drive that started the home-movie-burning revolution. Debuting at half the original's $995 price, the CenDyne writes and rewrites to capacious 4.7GB DVD-R/RW media as well as CD-Rs and CD-RWs. It also offers faster read speeds and better media handling. Unfortunately, however, it's beginning to look a bit slow compared to its DVD+RW competition.CenDyne's DVR-104 DVD-RW drive is the latest version of the DVR-103, the Pioneer drive that started the home-movie-burning revolution. Debuting at half the original's $995 price, the CenDyne writes and rewrites to capacious 4.7GB DVD-R/RW media as well as CD-Rs and CD-RWs. It also offers faster read speeds and better media handling. Unfortunately, however, it's beginning to look a bit slow compared to its DVD+RW competition.

Modest beginnings
We can't comment as much as we'd like on the DVR-104's installation because the drive we tested lacked final packaging and accessories. However, we can say that the preproduction documentation covered installation adequately; shipping units should have a full user guide. One hassle we remember from the DVR-103 is repeated here: There's no jumper chart on the label or the back plate, so you'll have to refer to the user guide to find the assignments. The drive is compatible with every version of Windows from 95 OSR2 onward, with the exception of Windows 2000 Server.

Some of the $499 DVR-104's write capabilities are better than those of the DVR-103, which haughtily spit high-speed media back at you. Instead, the DVR-104 is much friendlier, writing readily to 8X- to 12X-rated CD-RW media--albeit at its 4X maximum speed. Also new is Burn-Proof buffer-underrun protection for CD-R, so the DVR-104 can reliably create discs even while you're multitasking.

Par five
One trait we wish the DVR-104 hadn't inherited from the DVR-103 concerns write performance on CNET Labs' tests. The DVR-104's write speed is fine, but it takes an inordinate amount of time to close a disc. The DVR-104 burned our 3.24GB test movie (959MB after compression) to DVD-R in 13 minutes, 16 seconds, but part of this time was spent closing the disc. (Pioneer is aware of this problem.) Fortunately, the "closing time" doesn't increase significantly with the amount of data written. Another bottleneck occurred while writing groups of files; our 500MB-directory write test took an abysmal 11 minutes, 3 seconds. By contrast, writing one large, 383MB file took a more reasonable 4 minutes, 44 seconds. Note: Though CenDyne plans to include Ahead InCD with the shipping product, it did not come with our evaluation unit. We used Veritas DLA for the packet-writing tests.

The drive posted more reasonable scores on our other tests, reading back a 500MB directory in 7 minutes, 17 seconds and a single 383MB file in 4 minutes, 42 seconds. We didn't officially test the DVR-104's CD-R/RW write performance, but during our informal look, it was about what you'd expect from a drive with 8X/4X ratings--which are still slower than the 12X/10X ratings offered by competing DVD+RW drives. Continue reading

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