Toshiba TS-H652D Review

DVD Writing Capabilities

For our DVD writing tests we will write to various types of disks including DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-R DL and measure various aspects of the recording such as the total time taken, the write strategy employed and the average speed.

Certain disks have Parity data which tell the drive how to correct errors. PI errors are normal and can be corrected by a drive but when you have too many the can cause problems as slight defects (scratches, dust, fingerprints etc) may cause a disk to become unreadable.

We are also going to measure the write quality of the disks to see how well they have been written using Plextools and its Q-CHECK SUM8 PI/PO test.

Lots of graphs and data can look confusing if all your after is to find out if the drive is any good or not so to simplify things you should remember a few things, the lower the blue lines on the quality graph, the better the disk. Recording faster will often increase the error rates so low speed recorded disks often have good quality. Different drives and disks have different quality so not everything will be the same, but if you have the same disk and drive then you should expect very similar quality at a given speed.

According to the DVD standards the error limits should be below the following:

Parity Inner Errors (PIE) = 280

Parity Inner Failures (PIF) = 4

Parity Outer Failures (POF) = 0

The bold line on the error graph is always positioned at 280 for PIE. Our quality tests were conducted with a Plextor 716A drive.

DVD Writing Performance

DVD+R RECORDING 16 SPEED VERBATIM @ 18 SPEED

Book Type : DVD+R
Manufacturer: : Verbatim
MID : MCC 004 000 (00)
Write speeds: : 4 X - 8 X - 12 X - 16 X - 18 X

The drive put in a good performance and wrote the disk in 5 mins 18 seconds and the disk quality was good. The quality was tested using a Plextor 716 drive with 1.10 firmware installed and KProbe.

DVD+R RECORDING 16 SPEED MAXELL @ 16 SPEED

Book Type : DVD+R
MID : MAXELL 003 000 (00)
Write speeds: : 4 X - 8.0 X - 8 X - 12.0 X - 12 X - 16.0 X - 16 X - 18 X
Blank Capacity : 4.38 GB
: 4482 MB
: 4700375040 bytes
Write strategies : 4 X

We used a Maxell DVD+R x16 speed certified disc which can be written at 18 speed on some DVD writers. The Toshiba only supported this disk at 16 speed and took 6 mins 05 seconds. Maxell's disk quality is great and gives us our all time lowest PI Error rating of just 5092 errors for a 16x disk.

DVD+R DOUBLE LAYER RECORDING VERBATIM (8x) @ 8 SPEED

Book Type : DVD+R DL
Manufacturer: : Verbatim
MID : MKM 003 000 (00)
Write speeds: : 4 X - 6 X - 8 X
Blank Capacity : 7.96 GB
: 8152 MB
: 8547993600 bytes

Here we used a Verbatim double layer disk and it recorded it at 8 speed using ZCLV taking 18 mins 31 seconds.

DVD+R DOUBLE LAYER RECORDING RICOH @ 8 SPEED

RICOH 8X DOUBLE LAYER

Disc type: : DVD+R DL
Book Type : DVD+R DL
Manufacturer: : Ricoh
MID : RICOHJPN D01 002 (02)
Write speeds: : 4 X - 6 X - 8 X
Blank Capacity : 7.96 GB
: 8152 MB

The Toshiba drive managed to write the disk in 18 mins 36 seconds using a Z-CLV writing mode. The disk was not very good though and failed the disk quality check.

DVD-R DUAL LAYER RECORDING VERBATIM (8x) @ 8 SPEED

Disc type: : DVD-R DL
Book Type : DVD-R
Manufacturer: : Verbatim
MID : MKM 03RD30
Write speeds: : 4 X - 6 X - 8 X
Blank Capacity : 7.96 GB
: 8147 MB
: 8543668224 bytes

Verbatim were kind enough to supply us with their latest DVD-R 8x DVD-R dual layered media. In the Toshiba drive it took 18 mins and 40 seconds to complete the writing test.

DVD-R RECORDING TDK @ 8 SPEED

Book Type : DVD-R
Manufacturer: : unknown
MID : TYG02
Write speeds: : 4 X - 8 X
Blank Capacity : 4.38 GB

The drives performance with TDK Taiyo Yuden made disks was good, the PI errors barley rose more than 16. The overall time taken to write this disk was 8 mins 20 seconds @ 8 speed.

DVD-R RECORDING VERBATIM @ 18 SPEED

Book Type : DVD-R
Manufacturer: : Verbatim
MID : MCC 03RG20
Write speeds: : 4 X - 8 X - 12 X - 16 X - 18 X
Blank Capacity : 4.38 GB
: 4489 MB

The Toshiba TS-H652D only took 5mins 18 seconds to write to the DVD-R verbatim disk and as you can see it managed to write it at 18.29x speed towards the end. The disk quality was not very good though with high PI errors.

DVD-R RECORDING 16 SPEED MAXELL @ 16 SPEED

Book Type : DVD-R
Manufacturer: : Maxell
MID : MXL RG04
Write speeds: : 4 X - 8.0 X - 8 X - 16.0 X - 16 X - 18 X
Blank Capacity : 4.38 GB
: 4489 MB

The TS-H652D does not overspeed the disk and writes it normally at 16x speed, its time was 6 mins 02 seconds.

RE-WRITEABLE DVDS

DVD-RAM RECORDING VERBATIM @ 5 SPEED

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

Our 5x DVD-RAM Verbatim disk took 11 mins 06 seconds, but enabling autoverify (as enabled by nero) the speed will be much slower and here it took 26mins 18 seconds. The only 12x DVD-RAM currently on the market is made by MAXELL and they only distribute it in Japan.

DVD+RW RECORDING VERBATIM @ 8 SPEED

Disc type: : DVD+RW
Book Type : DVD+RW
Manufacturer: : Verbatim
MID : MKM A03 000 (00)
Write speeds: : 6 X - 8 X
Blank Capacity : 4.38 GB
: 4482 MB
: 4700375040 bytes

In our 8 speed rewriteable test it only took 8 mins 38 seconds but the quality wasnt very good in the inital parts of the disk.

DVD-RW RECORDING JVC @ 6 SPEED

Disc type: : DVD-RW
Book Type : DVD-RW
Manufacturer: : unknown
MID : JVC1Victord7
Write speeds: : 4 X - 6 X
Blank Capacity : 4.38 GB
: 4489 MB

Next we tried a DVD-RW re-writeable 6 speed disk for the dash "-RW" format, the drive took 10mins and 43 seconds, as you can see it uses zoned-CLV to write to it.

Page 6 - Last Updated: 15 January 2007