NEC is well known for producing DVD writers which produce excellent quality recordings on both CD-R/RW and DVD±R/RW (DL) media and the NEC ND-3540 is no exception. One of the last NEC models, the ND-3500A has been the most widely used DVD-Writer. The ND-3540A has similar features to the ND-3520A, but with the improvement of 6x DVD-R Dual Layer, 8x DVD+R Double layer and 32x CD-RW support. The NEC ND-3520A supported up to 4x on both DVD±R DL media and up to 24x on CD-RW media.
It has been over a year since we last reviewed an NEC drive, so this drive obviously has significant changes and improvements over the NEC ND-2500A we last reviewed. NEC was kind enough to send a retail version of the NEC ND-3540A to our reviewer Jan in Germany. As usual with other reviews, this drive has been put through intensive tests with a very wide variety of recordable DVD±R/RW (DL) and CD-R/RW media.
Summary of Specifications:
| Transfer rate | DVD+R | 16x max. ADVERTISEMENT
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| (read & write): | DVD-R | 16x max. |
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| DVD+RW | 8x max. |
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| DVD-RW | 6x max. |
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| DVD+R DL | 8x max. |
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| DVD-R DL | 4x max. (6x with updated firmware) |
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| CD-R | 48x max. |
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| CD-RW | 32x max. |
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| Access time: | DVD | 140ms |
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| CD | 120ms |
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| Mechanism | Tray type | Motorised tray |
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| Tray position | Vertical / Horizontal use |
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| Burst Transfer | PIO | Mode 4 |
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| DMA | Ultra DMA 33 |
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| Cache | Size | 2MB |
Like the previous NEC ND-35xx models, this drive is one of the few drives to support up to 16x reading on both DVD+R and DVD-R media, unlike many other brands that lock the read-back speed to just 8x maximum. In our test, this drive also achieves the fastest read performance for DVD rewritable media of about 13x for both DVD+RW and DVD-RW discs, using the official firmware.
The full review of the NEC ND-3540A including full specifications can be viewed on this page, where the review has been published. If you have questions about this drive or comments to make, feel free to discuss about the drive in this forum
thread.
Source: CDFreaks - Reviews
