Pioneer released the DVR-115D a couple of months ago. The DVR-115D is a traditional DVD-burner that is capable of 40x CD-R writing, 32x CD-RW writing, and 20x speed on DVD-R and DVD+R discs. The DVR-115D connects to the ATA port as most burners do. However, the brand new DVR-215D may have the same writing performance internally, but the burner itself connects to the computer through SATA, and that does make a difference, as we found out.

The DVR-115D reaches its highest speed with first-class media, i.e. Verbatim, Sony and TDK discs. Lesser grade discs may not be up to the high speeds this burner is capable of. I saw Toast Titanium 8 regularly slow down the writing performance even with Verbatim media in order to minimise the vibrations of the device. Hence, the DVR-115D should be incorporated in a computer chassis, really. The internal drive bay of a Power Mac or Mac Pro is what it takes to have this drive perform at its best.

However, even when enclosed in a LaCie d2 enclosure, the drive will perform at maximum performance once a heavy weight has been put on top of the drive. I planted Adobe’s Production Premium box as a stabilizing weight on top of the d2 enclosure and the drive immediately started performing better.

Higher Performance on a PC

With an old Power Mac G5 and a regular FireWire connection coming from an equally old d2 enclosure, the highest throughput speed I could get out of the DVR-115D was some 14x speed on DVD-R / DVD+R media. The same tests performed on a PC with Nero revealed a much higher speed --actually, the announced performance of 20x was reached. Take a look at the screenshots to see how Nero graphed the performance.

The DVR-215D faired better on my Power Mac, although this drive is internally identical to the 115 model. The reason why it did better was that I connected it to a WiebeTech SATADock v4 and from there on via FireWire 800. Apparently, the FireWire 800 port on the Power Mac G5 performs better than the FireWire 400 ports --at least, when you use them one by one.

For my tests, I disconnected all other FireWire equipment before trying the DVR-215D, and that gave a major performance boost. The drive performed like the DVR-115D connected to a PC. Connected directly to a SATA port (coming from a Sonnet Tempo card with 4 internal and 4 external SATA ports), the performance was even slightly higher as with the SATADock.

SATA Faster Even When Burning Discs

The DVR-215D’s performance was impressive enough to make you seriously considering yanking out the built-in “Superdrive” and exchanging it for the DVR-215D, even if that means you will have to remove its escutcheon (the part that makes the tray sit flush with the bezel) and you’ll have to move heaven and earth routing a SATA cable to drive the burner.

While I found the DVR-115D to be a sound performer with the quality of build and performance I’ve grown used to seeing from Pioneer over the last decade or so, it was the DVR-215D that I found truly appealing. You would think FireWire or ATA ios fast enough for even 20X speed, but apparently SATA’s architecture is better-suited even for DVD burning.