LG GSA-H12N Review

DVD READING TESTS Capabilities P1

DVD Read Performance

For our read tests we tried various types of DVD recordable media, which included: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RAM and a pressed DVD-ROM disk.

DVD-R READING

Firstly we checked its performance with a DVD-R disc:

The LG starts off well but performs the speed dips around the 4GB mark and continues at a slow speed towards the end. Despite the slow down, it still is faster.

DVD-RW READING

The LGs reading of DVD disks continues by putting in a good performance and here it peaks at 14x speed - only at the end of the test the speed dips skewing the graph.

DVD-ROM SINGLE LAYER READING

Both drives are within spec. and put in similar results at x16 reading (max).

DVD+RW READING

The LG only reads DVD+RWs at a maximum of 14 speed (not many drives can read rewriteables this fast).

DVD+R READING

The LG didn't have much problem with the DVD+R test except towards the end where it had to slow down.

DVD-R DUAL LAYER READING

We next tried a Verbatim Dual-Layered disk recorded at 4 speed. The LG drive was good at reading DVD-R DL disks and peaked at 12.35x speed.

DVD-RAM READING

Disc type: : DVD-RAM
Manufacturer: : Matsushita Electric Industrial CO.,LTD.
MID : M01J5006
Write speeds: : 2 X - 2 X - 3 X - 5 X
Blank Capacity : 4.27 GB
: 4368 MB
: 4580771840 bytes
Copyright protection : CPRM

Some of the newer DVD Writers on the market can now read and write the DVD-RAM format, above we used a Verbatim x5 disk which was actually made by Matsusita (Note this test will be updated once we get our delivery of 12x DVD-RAM disks).

DVD CSS Video Ripping

I 23:07:03 Source Device: [2:0:0] HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H12N UL01 (F:)
I 23:07:03 Destination Folder: L:\LOTR_SEE_D2\VIDEO_TS\
I 23:07:03 Detect Mastering Errors: No
I 23:07:03 Fast Error Skip: No
I 23:07:03 File Splitting: By File
I 23:07:03 Multi Angle Processing: No
I 23:07:03 Remove Macrovision Protection: Yes
I 23:07:03 Stream Processing: No
..
I 23:35:18 Operation Successfully Completed! - Duration: 00:28:15
I 23:35:18 Average Read Rate: 4,644 KB/s (3.4x) - Maximum Read Rate: 6,687 KB/s (4.8x)

Plextor 716A Average Rip Speed: 7.9 x

Toshiba TS-H652D Average Read Rate: 8,141 KB/s (5.9x)

LG GSA H12N Average Read Rate: 4,644 KB/s (3.4x)

The LG drive puts in a poor performance here and can only manage an average of 3.4x speed in ripping movies to disk.

ERROR CORRECTION - SCRATCHED DVD

No one manages to keep CD/DVDs in pristine condition so in this test we compared how the drive will copes with scratches and unreadable data. Different drives handle scratched / unreadable DVDs differently - some can take hours to read in data, whilst others have inferior error correction abilities and can only read limited data from the disk.

For this test we used a disk with 3 scratches, ink, finger prints, dust on a Ritek disk. We used Nero CD-DVD speed disk's scan disk function under "surface scan" mode to find out how much was unreadable. The LG drive puts in a solid performance in this test and only found 7% unreadable.

Page 5 - Last Updated: 15 January 2007