DVD-RAM writing performance:

The ASUS DRW-20B1LT is a so-called Multi drive, meaning it also supports the DVD-RAM format.

This drive is one of few drives that also supports the DVD-RAM format, lets us look at the recording side of the disc, and as you can see it has differences from the other DVD+R/W/R9 DL and DVD-R/W discs.

We can see a very fascinating pattern of darker spots. These tick marks are "address information" ("Pre-mastered Pit Header Field") which is embedded onto the disc. This is header information in front of data sector area, and is the same format as HDD and MO.

A DVD-RAM’s disc can be formatted in the following formats:

• FAT32
• UDF 1.02
• UDF 1.50
• UDF 2.00
• UDF 2.01
• UDF 2.50

By formatting a DVD-RAM disc with FAT32 it will act like a removable hard drive and all writing will be done as “background processes”. Meaning you do not have to wait for it to finish, you can start or work with other applications while the DVD-RAM is working without noticing any “hangs” or CPU slowdowns.

DVD-RAM has error correction, but also has error replacement to spare sectors as a "defect management" function. This gives higher reliability than other DVD format.

Another advantage with DVD-RAM is that the discs can be formatted/erased/written at over 100.000 times before it will/can cause/report any errors.

Lets us take a look at the media we are going to use in these tests.

Maxell 12x rated DVD-RAM media

As we can see, the ASUS DRW-20B1LT wrote our 12x rated test media at 12X in 5 minutes and 41 seconds

Now let’s see if the ASUS DRW-20B1LT can read our test disc.

The ASUS DRW-20B1LT read our test DVD-RAM disc at without any problems. 

We then ran a CD-Speed’s Scandisc function to check the disc for errors on our Lite-On reader.

As we can see, the disc has no errors.

Summary:

The ASUS DRW-20B1LT proved reliable at writing and reading our 12X DVD-RAM media.

Let’s round off this review with the Authors page, with some real world and advanced tests….