Burn Test Review: DIGISTOR Self-Powered External DVD Burner

So we got our new slot-loading DIGISTOR Self-Powered USB DVD Burner, and we wanted to put it through the paces. We wanted to see if the burn speeds were acceptable enough for us to bring it along, partnering it with our laptops and netbooks.

The DIGISTOR Self-Powered DVD Burner - Burn tested

TEST BED:

• ASUS K50IJ Series laptop, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, Core 2 Duo Proc, Vista
• For burning, we used Ashampoo’s Burning Studio 7
• DIGISTOR Self-Powered DVD Burner, connected via USB 2.0

The DIGISTOR USB DVD Burner connected to the test system

We put it through 3 very normal tasks – 1) a full 4.7GB data burn on a Sony DVD-R, 2) an ISO creation task from a 7.9GB DVD9 movie, and 3) burning the said DVD9 movie ISO onto a Philips DVD+R DL (double layer). As a side note, we were also doing normal browsing and internet tasks during these processes, to simulate how you would use the drive on a day-to-day basis. We were not doing anything much else that was resource-heavy in the background.

Ashampoo Burning Studio 7

Upon plugging it in, the drive was immediately detected by the OS. After driver installation and registration, the DIGISTOR external DVD writer was ready to use around 2mins after plugging it in. It should be noted that while a MATSHITA (globally known as Panasonic) optical drive is the foundation of this external burner, the sleek design, the power source technology and the IDE/SATA bridging is all DIGISTOR.

The DIGISTOR USB DVD Drive has MATSHITA/PANASONIC optical drive technology

TEST RESULTS:

For Task #1, the 4.7GB data burn (files consisted of videos, music, and documents) proceeded at the promised 8X speed using a Sony DVD-R blank disc, and finished in roughly around 10 minutes. This might seem a long time to wait for a data burn, but remember that we used the whole 4.7GB capacity. Most data burns you will do will usually be below 4GB, and will last anywhere from 4-9 minutes. All in all, the speed was quite satisfactory for us.

For Task #2, we used an unprotected double layer (DVD9) copy of the movie Hotel Rwanda, the data amounting to 7.9GB. We were mildly surprised at the speed which the ISO was copied and created — at 8X speed, it took the drive and the software 20 minutes to finish the task. Not bad at all.

For Task #3, we tried to burn the said ISO image into a Philips DVD+R DL blank disk, capacity was 8.5GB and max speed of the media was 8X. We were a bit miffed at the fact that the double layer burn could only max out at 6X speed, but we proceeded with the test. At first, Ashampoo reported an estimated time of 45 minutes for the whole process. But the drive, the OS and the software came through in the end and delivered an acceptable total burn time of 37 minutes, beating the estimate by 8 minutes.

Conclusion

The DIGISTOR Self-Powered DVD Burner is a full-featured optical DVD burner, and is a robust drive to pair with your portable devices. It is works at very acceptable speeds and the design and technology appears to be very reliable. If you need a USB DVD burner to pair with a netbook, this is a very solid choice.