ASUS DRW 1814BLT

The ASUS DRW 1814BLT isn’t, as some would think, Tchaikovsky’s last overture about his favourite fatty sandwich.

Its other standout feature, perhaps more so than the others, is it is the first SATA burner to hit our labs. Sure, Plextor has done it before, but being Plextor it wasn’t even remotely affordable. Dare we dream it? IDE dead for good?

Plugging in the drive was no issue, with Windows identifying it without skipping a beat. There was also no issue booting the system from the drive on our 680i test bench, showing that recognition is not a problem.

Sound is also not a problem, as during burning and verifying we barely heard a thing compared to our noisy old Pioneer DVR-110D.

Using ImgBurn 2.2.0.0’s ‘Discovery’ mode, we burnt a test disc at 16x using a Taiyo Yuden TYG03 16x DVD-R, graphing the results of the burn in DVDInfoPro. This revealed a CPU usage spike at the point where the drive increased to 12x, and also at the end when closing the disc where it exceeded 20 percent. The rest of the burn averaged four percent CPU usage, the disc completing in six minutes and 12 seconds.

Unfortunately this increase in CPU usage at the end of the disc also meant a vast increase in PI errors according to Nero CD-DVD Speed 4.7.0.0, suggesting some work needs to be done. This result was replicated with older Verbatim 8x DVD-R MCC 02RG20 media. Still, these errors were within acceptable limits, and for a first run firmware this drive is quite nice indeed, ASUS just needing to break out the Caelum and tweak a tiny bit more.

If it’s time to upgrade the old writer, at this stage the ASUS is a very attractive buy indeed.