CR40

PC World

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The brushed silver finish of this drive looks elegant, and matches the colour schemes and styling of a lot of the small form factor enclosures in Shuttle's range. It is interesting too that Shuttle has chosen to build this drive with a 19cm depth. Short-depth drives, which can be less than 17cm, are desirable not only for small form-factor PCs, but for mid-tower cases, as they allow plenty of room at the rear of the drive for cable management.

Pros

  • Fast single layer DVD writing

Cons

  • Slow DVD DL writing, slow CD ripping

Bottom Line

Buy it if you want blazing DVD-R and DVD+R performance, but consider another model if CD and double layer DVD performance is a requirement.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 121.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

The CR40 is one of only a few drives capable of burning 8X DVD-R discs at 12X, and this allowed it to produce very fast burn times in our test. It burnt a full DVD-R disc in 6 minutes and 2 seconds.

Its DVD+R performance was equally impressive at 16X, with our 16X DVD+R disc burning in only 5 minutes and 29 seconds. Its double layer write performance was sluggish though, especially considering it is a 4X burner. It took 37 minutes and 41 seconds to complete a DVD+R DL burn time.

The drive uses the CAV method to write and read at its highest speeds, while burn control algorithms are used to asses the amount of power the write function needs at each section of the burn. This algorithm is said to improve the reliability of the burns, especially as the laser reaches the outer edges of a disc. In our read tests, we found all the discs created by this burner were readable in older drives, and no anomalies or read errors were experienced.

Its CD read performance was very disappointing. This poor read performance was reflected in the time it took to rip a 78-minute CD: a sleep-inducing 10 minutes and 2 seconds.

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