Pioneer DVR-212 DVD-RW

Top drive, this, plus it's the first SATA optical drive we've had a play with.

As Pioneer’s first entry into the SATA burner market, the DVR-212 has a lot to live up to. Competitors such as Lite-On, Plextor and Samsung already have SATA devices available, but the Pioneer stands apart as the first native SATA unit on the market – the rest use an EIDE bridge.

To begin, a fresh install of Windows Vista was done using the 212, dispelling the concerns that installing via SATA optical drive would be troublesome. Using IMGBurn and DVD Info Pro the drive was tested against media from Verbatim, TDK, Imation, and Taiyo Yuden. Verbatim 2.4x dual-layer discs happily spun at 8x and produced near-perfect parity and jitter results. These results were mirrored in all single-layer tests, even with particularly troublesome media. The 212 automatically over-speeds Verbatim 16x media to 18x, however TDK media failed to over-speed, with TDK003 only burning at 16x on the 1.15 firmware. As with many other drives in the DVR series, TYG02 8x still burns at 12x with no problems.

While immature firmware may currently result in write speed problems with some media, this will no doubt become the flagship burner of the Pioneer stable with little development required. Equipped with 10x burning support on double-layer media such as MKM003, the 212 is at the top of the game. Along with 12x DVD-RAM II support, the 212 is no slouch in dealing with exotic media types, however as with previous models, CDs burn at a maximum of 40x.

On lesser quality media such as Ritek F1 and CMC Mag M01, the DVR-212 comes out ahead of other burners in its class. While the 212 isn’t the fastest on the market – Lite-On’s 20x unit taking that crown – it certainly has the highest quality burns over all discs tested, with even the troublesome media from Moser Bayer coming out clear in the CRC tests.

Included with the OEM drive is a copy of Nero 7 Essentials, although there are more streamlined applications like IMGBurn available.

Our benchmarks show the 212 to be the best SATA burner around, and with a two-year warranty, you would be crazy to look at anything else.