Toshiba SD-R5372 Review

Installation

The Toshiba SD-R 5372 is an IDE drive and like most CD/DVD drives the installation was simple. The drive was detected in Windows XP without any problems. Auto insert notification was disabled.

Above we have a screen shot from Nero's Infotool 2.27 of the SD-R5372.

It is reporting that the Read speed is: 48 X and write speed is 48 X for CD-R disks and we can also see the SD-R 5372 only has a 2MB buffer. It can read "+" & "-" disks, i.e. DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW and it can also read DVD-RAM disks (out of their caddy).

The drive supports a buffer underrun protection system for CDs and DVDs and can report C2 errors. Infotool is also reporting that the drive can write CD-Text, CD-R and CD-RWs disks. You can also see that the drive supports reading and writing to DVD+R DL (Dual Layer) disks.

Mount Rainier is not supported and it can not write to DVD-RAM (only read it).

Our review drive is a November 2004 C1 model with a version number 1 that came shipped with firmware version TU53 - no new version was available.

The software we used for this review was: Nero 6.6.0.5, RecordNow Max 4.51 DX & CloneCD 5. The following is a screen shot from Nero 6.6.0.5 and shows us what it discovers about the drive:

We can see that the maximum CD speed is 48x and that it supports cuesheets and DAO/96 writing. It also supports the overburning of CDs and the writing of CD-Text information.

SUPPORTED FEATURES - DISKINFOPRO / DISCJUGGLER

From the various tools we used to interrogate the drive we can see from the screenshots that Mount Rainer is NOT supported. The Toshiba SD-R can read CDs at 48 speed and can rewrite CDs at 24 speed on US disks. For its DVD-ROM reading ability the drive will only read up to 16 speed on single layer disks while it can write DVD "-" and "+" disks at 16 speed.

Page 2 - Last Updated: 23 January 2005