Toshiba have sent us their latest, and fastest DVD ±R/RW drive – the SD-R5472 6x burn speed dual layer drive. Supporting a whole range of DVD and CD types, it has the ability to store upto 8.5gb on a single disk, and it’s very fast read and write speeds, at first glances this looks like the ultimate drive. But is it? We find out!

Photo of the Toshiba dual layer drive retail box

As each year passes, everyone wants and expects faster things from their computers. And this of course pushes manufacturers to develop faster and faster components, which has lead to the development of this drive. This is Toshiba’s latest optical drive – the R5472.

The SD-R5472 offers DVD±R speeds up to 16x, up to 6x on DVD-RW, 8x on DVD+RW and 48X CD-R. At the time of writing, this is one of the fastest DVD-RW recorder on the market.

Let’s get onto some specifications for the SD-R5472. First, a list of all media the drive is compatible with:

DVD (Write)
DVD-R, DVD-R DL, DVD-RW DVD+R, DVD+R DL, DVD+RW
CD (Write)
CD-R, CDRW, HS CD-RW, US CD-RW
DVD (Read)
DVD-ROM, DVD-R. DVD-RW, DVD-R DL DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD+R DL, DVD-RAM (Ver2.1)
CD (Read)
CD-DA, CD+E(G), CD-MIDI, CD-TEXT, CD-ROM, CD-ROM XA, MIXED MODE CD, CD-I, CD-I Bridge (Photo-CD, Video-CD), Multisession CD (Photo-CD, CD-EXTRA, Portfolio, CD-R, CD-RW)

So that is quite an impressive list, however to be honest, most drives now are compatible with most, if not all (assuming drive is DVD±R/RW) of those types.

The read/write speeds of the main media types are as follows:
6x DL DVD+R (write)
4x DL DVD-R (write)
8x DVD+RW (write)
6x DVD-RW (write)
16x DVD +/- R
48x CD-R

Although pretty standard, and you would have a hard time finding a drive now without it, the SD-R5472 supports both horizontal and vertical mounting. The drive also has the following features:

•     ATAPI interface
•     Buffer Underrun prevention
•     2MB Buffer

The average random access time for CD is 110ms, and 130ms for DVD.

What you get in the box

• The Drive itself
• Installation Guide
• All Cables, leads and screws
• Software – Nero OEM Suite and a “Manuals & More” CD
• and two “Win Tickets to the 2006 FIFA World Cup” fliers

Cables, disks,manuals

The drive itself

The “Manuals & More” CD actually contained nothing relating to this DVD recorder – this product wasn’t listed under the (web-browser based) interface to select your drive. However, this may change once this product hits the shops.

As mentioned, the retail box also includes some fliers about a competition that Toshiba are running, to win tickets to the 2006 FIFA World Cup Matches. In our box we got both the English, and German versions of these fliers, although neither are particularly  interesting or useful (unless you win, of course)

Screenshot of the “Manuals & More” interface. The disk is little more than a few HTML files (and some “downloadable” files on the disk)

Installation
Installing this drive is as easy as installing any other CD or DVD drive from the last 10 years. It is as simple as just plugging in the Molex power cable, the IDE cable, and the sound cable. The jumper is pre-installed, and set to “MASTER”. Changing this to cable Select or Slave is painfully easy (jumper comes of easily enough, however it is on tight enough not to come off by itself). Installing the software (i.e. Nero) is a piece of cake, and it works straight away with the drive with very little help from the user. There is not much else to say really about installation.

Screenshot of Nero InfoTool. Note the read and write speeds it shows

Information from DVDInfoPro about the drive

Testing and Benchmarking

Firstly, we used the Nero CD-DVD speed utility to benchmark the drive. First test was the Nero CD that came inside the drive box.

Testing the read speed of a CD-ROM, with the average speed being a low 29x speed.

The next benchmark was similar to the previous one, but with a DVD. In this case, the Battlefield 2 DVD. This DVD was only 1.91GB – usually drives tend to reach their highest speeds with larger disks.

Testing the read speed of a DVD, with the average speed being just under 10x.

Our next benchmark comes from DVDInfoPro.

This shows the benchmark from DVDInfoPro for the same Battlefield 2 DVD disk

Overall

One thing that we have not yet mentioned is the noise. Although it is not particularly noisy, it seems louder than the other DVD drive on the testing rig  (a Sony CRZ320E DVD/CDRW drive). It is loud enough to hear it whirl around, but not loud enough to annoy you while using your computer.

Visually, it looks like almost any other drive. It does seem however to have a “blocky” feel, with very little curves in the design (for example the eject button is a right angled rectangle, rather than a smooth cornered button as found on many other drives). The flashing green LED light to indicate that the drive is reading is just about as bright as any other LED, so there is not much to say there.

The SD-R5472 will be available to buy as either the retail kit (as we reviewed here), or as an OEM version from some dealers. Visit www.toshiba-europe.com/storage to find out more or to buy.