Sony Slim-Line DRX-S50U Review

DVD-RAM writing performance:

The Sony DRX-S50U is a so-called Multi DVD Drive, meaning is also supports writing and reading 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.

On the data side, we can see a very fascinating pattern of lighter spots, supposedly these spots are used for calibration while writing and reading.

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, and 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.

Lets us take a look how the drive performs:

Maxell branded 12x media manufactured by Maxell.
Thanks to ExtremeMhz for providing this media. The Sony DRX-S50 supports up to 5X speed.

Writing Maxell 12x Disc at 5x (supported speed) without verification

Writing Maxell 12x Disc with verification

Transfer Rate test

As we can see, the Sony DRX-S50U writes 5x DVD-RAM without any problem, read back the disc at 5x speed in 14:16 minutes.

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 3x and 5x media was written at 1.3x and 2x, respectively. 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.

This concludes our Sony DRX-S50U review, lets head on to the last page to read our conclusion…