ASUS DRW-0804P: Another 8X Dual Contender
by Kristopher Kubicki on April 20, 2004 12:05 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Tech Support
One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb pioneered the original tech support benchmark for motherboards and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.We used three camouflaged email addresses and emailed particularly trivial questions concerning our burners to each vendor. If tech support was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (3 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result. Our original results from the last DVDR Roundup combined with the ASUS 8x8 are below:
| Average Customer Support Response Time | |
| ASUS (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| ASUS (Mar 2004) | No Response - Update*** |
| Gigabyte (Dec 2003) | 38 hours, 12 minutes |
| LiteOn (Dec 2003) | 41 hours, 20 minutes |
| MSI (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| MSI (Mar 2004) | 27 hours, 11 minutes |
| NEC (Dec 2003) | 29 hours, 48 mintues |
| Nu Tech (Dec 2003) | N/A |
| Plextor (Dec 2003) | 11 hours, 10 minutes |
| Sony (Dec 2003) | 6 hours, 44 minutes |
***Update: We recently worked with ASUS concerning the issue of no response on our tech support. We were able to narrow the emails down to a spam filter on ASUS's tech support server which was unfortunately not allowing our emails through. This was the results of too many numerical characters in the email address. As we recommend below, if you receive a bounced email or no response from the email support, the best solution is to call their tech support number.
Like our December 2003 roundup, we were unable to receive a response from ASUS via the US tech support email tsd@asus.com. However, this benchmark is slightly misleading for a company like ASUS. Even though we were unable to find tech support help via email, the ASUS support site provided us with answers for two of the three questions submitted. Through the ASUS support line, (502)-995-0883, the final question was answered.
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TrogdorJW - Tuesday, April 27, 2004 - link
Let's not forget #5 that Blu Ray discs won't be readable in standard DVD players either, right? Might as well go buy one of those new Sony drives that cost $2500 to $3000 and store an amazing 37 GB or some such of data. And they "only" cost $45 per cartridge. Gee... $80 GB hard drives only cost about $70 and are much faster. Get some hot-swap setup, and these cartridge optical discs are destined for the scrap heap of history.And WTF is up with my login password not sticking!? Stupid LAN admins....
KristopherKubicki - Monday, April 26, 2004 - link
Yeah, it should be published in the next couple days.Kristopher
LeftSide - Friday, April 23, 2004 - link
I think anandtech needs to redo the review on the nu tech 81. They have released the new firmware that alows the buner to burn on dvd-r's.Ian@CDRlabs - Wednesday, April 21, 2004 - link
Blu-Ray? You're either very rich or you're willing to wait a few years until the technology becomes affordable.PrinceGaz - Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - link
I'm looking to buy a DVD burner very soon as software is increasingly being released on DVD instead of (or as well as) CD. Splitting multi-gig image-files across several CDs isn't the most elegant solution.From what I've read on cdfreaks.com (which despite how their url might sound is really a very fine site specialising in optical storage), the NEC ND-2500A and Pioneer DVR-107D are the best drives currently available that lots of people have tested with a wide variety of media, and they both have strengths and weaknesses. I'm seriously tempted to go with the NEC ND-2500A given its low price and generally excellent reports on burn quality which is the whole reason for having a DVD burner (the less than stellar read performance with damaged media isn't so important to me).
Is the new 8x DVD burner round-up almost finished?
Eeek, I've just checked prices and seen that CD readers are less than £13, and CD burners around £21. Theres even a 4x DVD burner coming in at as little as £50. Those prices are crazy! Has the bottom totally dropped out of the optical storage market?
SUOrangeman - Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - link
I think any "waste" of money on current DVD burner must be weighted against the actual cost(s). For instance, if someone was running a special on this Asus drive for, say, $60, is that really as much of a "waste" as buying it for $120? Is it even a waste at all for $60?-SUO
araczynski - Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - link
i think anyone with half a brain would have not waste any money on any DVD burner since the bluerays are just around the corner.besides, the name of the game is consumables, not the drive, they all use the same components from the same sources. just like printers.
spyhalfer - Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - link
not much info imho, who cares about the 0.01 difference in speed?error checking tests, with different media, would had been nice