Conclusion

This ASUS drive surprised us with its composure in all of the tests we put it through and it showed that it is ready for prime time. Even though it was compared to a BenQ drive that is almost two years old, its performance in the access time tests was a testament to ASUS's strive towards engineering excellence. Even with the performance numbers we saw across all media types, the CPU usage numbers were nothing short of spectacular at less than half of what the BenQ drive required. Mention also has to be made about the broad disk compatibility offered by the DRW-2014L1T and the fact that it has LightScribe. While the usefulness of LightScribe may be lost on some consumers, others find it to be a great tool for labeling and archiving DVDs.

We also like that this drive comes in full retail packaging where many other drives we see at the larger etailers here in Canada are OEM only and come without any software. It is also good to see that ASUS packaged a replacement faceplate with this drive since this gives the user the option to change the viewable color of their drive if they happen to switch cases. The fact that it is very silent even while running at top speeds is yet another very positive point.

I think that even though the new ASUS DRW-2014L1T DVD Writer is a great drive, it lacks in one very important performance area. Being outperformed by a two year old drive on spinning speeds is a blemish on its overall spotless performance record. Other than that, the only thing that we had a minor issue with was the colors of the face plates included; the beige isn’t quite beige and the black isn’t quite white.

All things considered, the ASUS DRW-2014L1T is a phenomenal drive with an attractive price point. Even though we would have like to have seen faster read speeds there is nothing else that would stop us from recommending this drive to you.


Pros:

• Fast access times
• Great burst rates
• LightScribe included
• Easy to install
• Very Silent
• The drive works on its side
• A different color drive cover included
• A vast amount of disc formats supported

Cons:

• The faceplate colors seem to be off, e.g. black = dark blue
• Drive has a lot of slow starts, e.g. slow spin-up times
• On several different disk formats, disk speeds are slower than our older drive