LG GGC-H20L

Katherine Stevenson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

So your DVD burner is getting a little long in the tooth and you’re ready for an upgrade, but you’re not all that keen on adopting next-gen tech. And who can blame you? Even the falling price of hardware doesn’t make up for the relatively slow burn times, costly media, and compatibility issues that plague Blu-ray burners (and the same would be true of HD DVD burners if you could even find them!). Trouble is, you’ve got a brand-new 27-inch LCD that’s just begging to display high-def movies. What’s a consumer to do? Well, you could buy a combo drive—one that lets you read next-gen discs and write data to fast, friendly CD and DVD, like the two models we review this month.

For just $20 more than Asus’s drive, LG’s GGC-H20L lets you read both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs—a luxury that’s well worth the extra cost of admission. The GGC-H20L also affords you slightly better DVD burning performance.

Rated at 16x for DVD+/-R writing, LG’s GGC-H20L bested Asus’s drive by filling a single-layer DVD+R in 5:51 (min:sec). And its random and full-access times were much lower when reading the disc (100/178ms versus 167/349ms), as was its CPU usage at 8x speed (24 percent versus 43 percent). But when it came time to write to double-layer and rewriteable DVD media, LG’s drive was just as ho-hum as Asus’s. The GGC-H20L took 27:28 to write 7.96GB to DVD-DL and 15:01 to write 4.38GB to DVD-RW.

Still, we’ll gladly take the HD DVD compatibility and faster DVD+/-R writes for a few extra bucks. Like the Asus drive, the GGC-H20L offers a SATA interface, a CyberLink bundle, and a simple, black face plate, so what’s there to lose?

Asus BC 1205PT

Katherine Stevenson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:57:05 -0600

With Asus’s BC-1205PT you get to read high-def discs, but only if they’re of the Blu-ray variety, so you’ll want to have a strong affinity for that format (and its affiliated movie studios) to take the plunge. Because while you do save money by forgoing the ability to write to Blu-ray, the BC-1205PT still isn’t cheap. It’s a couple hundred dollars more than a high-performance standard DVD drive, and its DVD burn performance is far from top-notch.

The BC-1205PT is rated at 12x for DVD+/-R write speeds—a good deal slower than today’s top DVD burners, now at 20x, and not surprisingly, burn times take a hit. It took us 7:12 (min:sec) to fill a single-layer DVD+R with the BC-1205PT, compared to the 5 minutes flat it took our favorite drive, Samsung’s SH-S203B (reviewed October 2007). Burning to a double-layer DVD, the Asus drive maintained a 3.96x average speed and filled the disc in 27:09, more than twice the time it took our Samsung. Only when burning to DVD-RW media did the Asus and Samsung perform on par, writing 4.38GB to a single-layer disc at 15:07 and 14:31, respectively. When reading data from all of our test discs, Asus’s drive had notably slower seek times than both the Samsung and the LG GCC-H20L reviewed here.

Middling performance aside, the BC-1205PT offers a SATA interface, the CyberLink BD Solution suite for playback and burning chores, and a simple, black face plate.

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LG GGC-H20L

Asus BC 1205PT