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Introduction:
On this page, the author of the review has the freedom to run tests that she/he thinks will enhance the review. These tests, unlike our standard tests, which we try to keep consistent throughout the whole review team, so that our reviews are as consistent as possible. This page gives the reviewer the opportunity to show some advanced and real world tests that other review team members may not be able to run.
Real World Tests:
Real world tests are designed to simulate what normal users might use their drives for in everyday use. For example, writing discs with a burning application.
Nero Burning Rom:
In the following tests we will burn discs from the main media groups with Nero Burning Rom.
CD-R:
For our data writing tests, we simply set up a new compilation of 703Mb using Nero Burning ROM software. Writing method used is DAO (Disc At Once), and the disc is set up as a non-multisession disc with “finalize disc” enabled. The screenshot below shows how long it takes to write a disc at the highest speed. (48x)
The ASUS BC-06B1ST burned our test CD-R at 48X in 2 minutes and 43 seconds.
DVD R:
In this test we will measure the time for writing to DVD R discs. We used Nero Burning Rom to burn an ISO compilation containing 4483Mb of data. We used the Disc-At-Once write method.
The ASUS BC-06B1ST burned our test DVD R at 16X in 5 minutes and 28 seconds.
DVD DL:
In this test we will measure the time for writing to DVD R DL discs. We used Nero Burning Rom to burn a Double Layer Disc containing 8103Mb of data. We used the Disc-At-Once write method. The BC-06B1ST is capable of writing at 8X; however, we regret that we only have test media that will write at 4X.
The ASUS BC-06B1ST burned our test DVD R DL at 4X in 26 minutes and 33 seconds.
Standalone DVD-Player compatibility test:
We only have 2 standalone DVD-Players available to test the DVD±R DL discs written during our DL write tests:
- Samsung BD-P1400 Blu-ray player
- Sharp TV/DVD Combo
Compatibility results:
Both our DVD Standalone devices played the DVD±R DL media burned by the ASUS BC-06B1ST without any problems.
CSS Encrypted DVD-Video ripping tests:
Most modern DVD burners don’t have Video riplock and in most cases will read a pressed DVD-Video SL disc at 16x speed. However, some drives use a CSS riplock when it comes to extracting data from the disc. If you attempt to rip a pressed DVD-Video with CSS encryption to your hard drive, the ripping speed may be locked at a much lower speed than 16X.
To test this feature, we needed a reference from a drive that we know does not employ CSS riplock. We choose the BenQ DW-1655 as a reference drive for this purpose and ripped a SL and DL pressed DVD-Video to our hard drive using DVDFab Platinum (full disc option).
We should point out, that ripping and compressing a DL DVD-Video disc to DVD 5 format is quite CPU intensive. The more power your system has, the less likely your system power will affect the results. The PC used in this review is equipped with a fast Intel Quad Core processor and fast hard drives. We checked to make sure our review PC was not having an impact on the results.
Below we can see our reference results.
SL CSS encrypted DVD Video disc “Flicka” (BenQ DW-1655 reference result)
Time taken = 8 minutes 55 seconds
DL CSS encrypted DVD Video disc “MI3” (BenQ DW-1655 reference result)
Time taken = 12 minutes 56 seconds
Now let’s test the ASUS BC-06B1ST using the same testing procedures.
SL CSS encrypted DVD-Video (Flicka):
The ASUS BC-06B1ST is not CSS riplocked and ripped our test DVD-Video SL disc in 9 minutes and 51 seconds.
DL CSS encrypted DVD-Video (MI3):
The ASUS BC-06B1ST is not CSS riplocked and ripped our test DVD-Video DL disc quite fast in 11 minutes and 52 seconds.
The ASUS BC-06B1ST ripped our test discs without problem; we would like to point out that it is also a relatively quiet drive.
MINI DVD discs:
In this section we are going to test if the ASUS BC-06B1ST is capable of writing and reading mini DVD-RW discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.37 GB.
The Memorex media is made by Verbatim. Thanks to Memorex for sending us this media.
The ASUS BC-06B1ST had no problems in writing our test mini DVD-RW disc.
Now let’s check if the ASUS BC-06B1ST can also read back our test disc.
The ASUS BC-06B1ST read back our test mini DVD-RW disc without any problems.
Video-CD disc:
For our final test we wanted to see how the ASUS BC-06B1ST would read a Video-CD, for this test we created a 76 minute Video-CD with Nero Burning ROM 8, and used NERO CD-DVD Speed to read the disc back. Below is our result:
The ASUS BC-06B1ST had no problems in reading our test VCD.
We are also able to play the VCD test disc with WMP.
This concludes our ASUS BC-06B1ST review. Let’s move on to our conclusions.
