What Should I Consider When Buying a DVD Drive?

DVD drive refers to the question of how many kinds of discs the DVD drive can support and compatible to read.

DVD drive

Right!

DVD drive refers to the question of how many kinds of discs the DVD drive can support and compatible to read.

As far as the data transmission rate is concerned, this is also something everyone should pay attention to. Many enthusiasts who are new to computers often ask why the multiple of a DVD drive is so low compared to a CD drive. As everyone knows, its nominal 4x and 5x speeds are the single-finger data transfer rate when reading DVD discs, and when reading CD discs, its double speeds can quickly reach speeds above 24x. For example, a Sony 5x speed DVD drive uses 5x speed when reading DVD discs, and 32x speed when reading CD discs. Generally speaking, a DVD drive with a speed of four times or more is sufficient for us. ^[1]

It refers to the question of how many kinds of discs the DVD drive can support and compatible to read. Generally speaking, a qualified DVD drive should be compatible with common formats such as DVD-ROM, DVD-VIDEO, DVD-R, CD-ROM, etc. For CD-R / RW, CD-I, VIDEO-CD, CD -G, etc. must be well supported, of course, the more formats that can be supported, the better.

There are two types of DVD drive interfaces: IDE and SCSI. Some of the current DVD drives use SCSI interfaces. The advantage of using this interface is that they have better stability and data transfer rate than DVD drives using IDE interfaces, and their CPU usage is also higher than IDE. The interface is much lower. However, it can only be connected through a SCSI card, which is not as easy to install and use as a DVD drive with an IDE interface.

Like CD drives and hard disks, the size of the data cache capacity of a DVD drive directly affects its overall performance. The larger the cache capacity, the higher the CACHE hit rate. Currently mainstream DVD drives use 512KB cache, but there are also DVD drives that only use 128KB cache.