I am looking to replace my pioneer 106S as I have problems with it reading DVD+RW, and I can't find a firmware to fix it. I tried the Sony and then the LiteOn. The pioneer averages 9x for ripping, the sony 7x and the liteon only 6x. After hearing such good things about the liteon, I was disappointed.
The one I received was the 166S. Is this slower then the 163D, which is the one reviewed in a couple of places? I am running windows xp professional and DMA is enabled.
And help would be appreciated.
I ran some more thorough tests last night and learned quite a lot.
One, single layer dvd and dual layer dvd does make a significant impact on the benchmark performance of a drive. Also, benchmarking does not tell the entire story.
I ran Nero dvd speed on the LiteOn and the Sony. On a dual layer DVD, the Sony came out ahead with an avg of 7.17x vs 5.92x. This was performed on the dual layer Matrix dvd.
Then, I ran the same test using the dvd of the movie "The Party", which is a single layer dvd. The results were very close. The Sony averaged 11.89x and the LiteOn 11.98x.
Then, came the interesting part, as I used dvd decryptor to see how long it would take to process the two dvds.
For the single layer dvd "The Party", again the results were close:
The Sony took a time of 5:02 with an average speed of 10.7 and a max of 14.4. The LiteOn took a time of 5:07 with an avg. of 10.5x and a max of 14.1x
Now, going by the Nero results, I would have expected the Sony to come out ahead using dvd decryptor on the Matrix dual layer dvd.
However, the results were very suprising and I still don't know why it is the case. The Sony took a time of 22:09 with an avg of 4.3x and a max of 6.1x whereas the LiteOn took a time of 16:39 averaging 5.7x with a maximum of 8.0x. The LiteOn was in agreement with the Nero results, however the Sony was in total disagreement with Nero. I tried the Sony a couple of times more usind dvd decryptor and got the same results. I am unable to explain it.
Regardless, it appears I will be keeping the LiteOn and returning the Sony.
