Sony BWU-200S Blu-ray Rewritable Drive Review

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Author

KIPPER
Retired Moderator & Reviewer
Article posted 12 Jan 08 05:13

DVD-RAM writing performance

 

DVD-RAM writing performance

The Sony BWU-200S is a Blu-ray rewriteable drive which is also supports writing and reading the DVD-RAM format; reading and writing at 5X.  

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 how the drive performs:

Writing the Maxell 5X without verification

Writing the Maxell 5X with verification

Transfer Rate Test

For those of you who are not familiar with DVD-RAM, you may probably think that something went wrong during the write process with the verification turned on, since the 5x media was written at just under 2X. But don’t worry, that is pretty normal for DVD-RAM discs. The reason for the lower writing speed is the drive constantly reads back the data after writing it to verify that it’s written correctly. We can also call it a “bullet proof” writing/verify technique, with no data loss/errors.

Summary

The Sony BWU-200S was able to read and write our tested media without any problems.

Moving on to next page you can read about Blu-Ray Performance…

10 Comments

guest
Posts: 15284
Posted on: 13 Jan 08 00:29
I have owned this burner for about a week and a half. So far, so good - no coasters burned yet. A good thing with blank media at $15-20USD. My Panasonic DMP-BD10 home player has no problems playing home HD videos burned with the Sony burner. Check out your player's format capability before burning any discs with any BD burner. Some players (like my Panny) will play only BDMV format; some players will play BDAV. This burner will burn either, but some burning software won't support BDAV. I am using Ulead Movie Factory with the HD add-in; it will burn either format. Others have noted that the Sony's drawer won't fit thru a normal cutout - that was the situation with my Dell XPS400. Tried trimming out the hole in the Dell; gave up and mounted the burner in an external enclosure. Overall, thumbs up even at the $600USD price.
Coconut
Posts: 173
Posted on: 14 Jan 08 00:41
Harry, what is the enclosure that you use, please?
guest
Posts: 15284
Posted on: 15 Jan 08 01:58
hmm, as in most of Kip's reviews there are no pictures of the inside of the drive, which in my opinion tells us a lot more about the technology used inside. Not at all interested in how the left and right side of the drive looks like. :c
heroineworshipper
Posts: 41
Posted on: 15 Jan 08 02:23
Only $500 more to go until it's affordable.
DeadMan
Posts: 1629
Posted on: 18 Jan 08 01:43
Cheaper per gigabyte to get an HDD and download x264 rips
guest
Posts: 15284
Posted on: 20 Jan 08 11:56
Ouch! $600, well. it IS a blue ray drive after all.. Yes dvds were crazy expensive too in their day.. but then again the format war is in the midst of Gettysburg battle. So it won't be long before one camp caves in.. and popularity forces price redux.
guest
Posts: 15284
Posted on: 20 Jan 08 22:53
"Harry, what is the enclosure that you use, please?" It is actually a cannabilized external one for a DVD drive. External 5.25" SATA enclosures are a little hard to find and are well over $50 when you do. I had to run a power cable and SATA cable out of the back of the PC and the back of the external enclosure. The enclosure I use has a power switch that is not maintained and the PC showed drive not available when booting if the power was not on. So, I ran an cable from the PC power supply. Kinda junky doing it that way, but it works.
guest
Posts: 15284
Posted on: 08 Feb 08 05:56
The LG GGW-H20L is selling for about $400 on ebay. It can write BD-R at 6x though 6x media seems not available yet. I tried TDK BD-R 25GB 2x certified media using the bundled software power2go. It was recognized as 4x by the software and finished writing a full disc in about 25 minutes. The above review didn't mention TDK BD-R. I wonder how BWU200S would perform with this media.
guest
Posts: 15284
Posted on: 17 Jul 08 22:49
Does it work under 64-bit Windows (WinXP Pro x64 or Vista 64)?
guest
Posts: 15284
Posted on: 18 Sep 08 10:46
Installed in my tower last night and Vista 64 had some issues with the software on installation. had to choose not to install parts of the package but once the rest were installed and upgraded the player for Blu-Ray commercial compatibility the rest of the software installed fine. no problems since then.

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