Toshiba TS-H652D Review

Installation

The Toshiba TS-H652D is an IDE drive and like most CD/DVD drives the installation was simple. The drive was detected on our Windows XP PC without any problems. Auto insert notification was disabled.

Above we have interrogated the drive using Nero's Infotool 4.70 of the TS-H652D to probe for more information. It is reporting that the Read speed is: 48 X and write speed is 48 X for CD-R disks and we can see the drive only has a 2MB buffer.

The drive supports a buffer underrun protection system (2MB) for CDs and DVDs and can report C2 errors. The drive can write CD-Text, CD-R and CD-RWs disks, as well as CD+G, you can also see that the drive supports reading and writing to DVD+R DL (Double Layer) disks as well as DVD-RAM.

Mount Rainier is not supported and SolidBurn and LabelFlash (disk label printing feature using the drives own laser) are not supported. The drive can not read/write any BD-R, BD-RE, BD-ROM disks (all bluray disks) nor can it read/write any HD DVD-R, HD DVD-RW, HD DVD-ROM (HD DVDROM disks)

Our Toshiba TS-H652D review drive is an August 2006 Ver.D on H/W A that came shipped with firmware version TI06 - no newer firmware version was available.

BOOKTYPE SETTING

The drive allows you to alter the drives Book Type setting - this allows the drive to flag +R/+RW media with a DVD-ROM identifier setting. Changing the booktype is needed because some older DVD players do not recognise disks that identify themselves as "+R" & "+RW". Disks recorded on -R / -RW do not need to use this setting as they have been around longer and are approved by the DVD forum.

As seen above, Toshiba TS H652D allows you to set the disks of "DVD+R" / "DVD+RW" / "DVD+R DL".

NERO

Nero can not see that the maximum CD speed properly and incorrectly reports it as 2x and that it supports cuesheets and DAO/96 writing. It also supports the overburning of CDs and the writing of CD-Text information, the buffer size is reported as 2048KB and it uses superlink as a buffer underrun protection.

SUPPORTED FEATURES - DISKINFOPRO / DISCJUGGLER

Using a few other tools we used to interrogate the drive we can see from the screenshots that Mount Rainer is NOT supported. The Toshiba TS-H652D can record defect managment data as used by DVD-RAM disks and write RW subcodes.

Page 2 - Last Updated: 15 January 2007