Spring 2004 DVD Performance Roundup: More DVD Dual 8X
by Kristopher Kubicki on April 28, 2004 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Tech Support
One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb originally pioneered the tech support benchmark for motherboards; and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.We took three camoflagued email addresses and emailed each vendor particularly trivial questions concerning our burners. If tech support was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (3 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result.
| Average Customer Support Response Time | |
| ASUS (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| ASUS (Mar 2004) | |
| ASUS (April 2004) | 66 hours, 20 minutes |
| AOpen (April 2004) | No Response |
| Gigabyte (Dec 2003) | 38 hours, 12 minutes |
| Gigabyte (April 2004) | No Response |
| LiteOn (Dec 2003) | 41 hours, 20 minutes |
| MSI (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| MSI (Mar 2004) | 27 hours, 11 minutes |
| NEC (Dec 2003) | 29 hours, 48 mintues |
| Nu Tech (Dec 2003) | N/A |
| Nu Tech (April 2004) | No Response |
| Plextor (Dec 2003) | 11 hours, 10 minutes |
| Sony (Dec 2003) | 6 hours, 44 minutes |
| Sony (April 2004) | 7 hours, 21 minutes |
| Toshiba (April 2004) | N/A |
We retested our ASUS tech support email under the suspicion that our tech support emails were being filtered by spam software. We worked with ASUS to rectify the problem, and the results for this roundup were much more favorable. As with the other benchmarks on ASUS' tech support, we found almost every answer to our questions from their website. An important thing to consider with ASUS' tech support email: if you do not receive an email confirmation within 30 minutes of your initial request, your email has probably been blocked by their spam software. Using their tech support line, (510) 995-0883, seems to be the best solution for immediate help.
AOpen and Gigabyte both had similar problems. For both manufacturers, your information must be entered into a form and then your problem should be answered within 48 hours. Unfortunately, neither website sent us a confirmation after submission, and neither website responded to our questions within 72 hours.
NuTech has a contact information page that brings up an email window for you to email some of their technical contacts directly. There are some general FAQs on their website, but they do not have the knowledge base of AOpen or ASUS just yet.
Since we received our Toshiba drive very late in the review, we did not have the opportunity to test customer support response time before the publish date of this article.
Again, Sony leads the pack in product support, and not just in the timed response aspect. Not only were we able to find all of our questions answered in their FAQ section, but there was also an online email submit form. Probably the icing on the cake was Sony's instant help chat. The first two questions we asked took less than 30 seconds for a Sony rep to walk us through. The third question took about two minutes. The rep also emailed us a log of our conversation for later. The live chat is available 24 hours a day. The extra cost of a Sony drive is easily justifiable if product support is an important issue.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
24 Comments
View All Comments
rlrus - Tuesday, May 4, 2004 - link
Nu has posted the official firmware upgrade B373, I hope this one is as good or better than the unofficial B372. I bought this drive and hope I have as good results as Anand Tech. With it's ability to write 8 times on 4 times Media and it's speed and error rate being almost as good as the more expensive drives it seemed a bargain.mcveigh - Sunday, May 2, 2004 - link
21:the Nu models do as well or better than everyone else and at the lowest price point.
why shouldn't they win?
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, May 1, 2004 - link
Jeff7181: I think there is a way to get it to scale proper. I will do that for the next review.Kristopher
QuaiBoy - Friday, April 30, 2004 - link
Seems to me that all of the DVD writer reviews lately on Anandtech seem to favor the Nutech product. I don't see a reason from these results to pick that drive over any of the others. There's nothing that makes it anything special, and it certainly doesn't deserve an award over the other drives.Another vote for total write times and for not claiming that all drives with the same chipset will perform similarly. Too many variables. At least test with more media types, like TY and Optodisc. Cheapies like Princo appeal to many as well.
-Evan-
Jeff7181 - Friday, April 30, 2004 - link
The Write Quality graphs are very misleading/hard to read since they are all on different scales... makes on look like crap until you realize you're looking at a 0 - 10 scale rather than 0 - 70. Anything you can do about that or are you just stuck displaying what the crappy software showed you?KristopherKubicki - Thursday, April 29, 2004 - link
This was all commented on in the article. The 708A and the 2500A also use radically different pickups and servos. But then again, i never claimed those two were similar in the review either.Belzer: most of those drives i pointed out were clearly rebadges.
Kristopher
CrazeeHorse - Thursday, April 29, 2004 - link
Belzer,yes. Maybe I should have rephrased my statement, as MAXIMUM burning speed. Yep, it also depends on the burn strategy employed.CrazeeHorse - Thursday, April 29, 2004 - link
Belzer,yes. Maybe I should have rephrased my statement, as MAXIMUM burning speed. Yep, it also depends on the burn strategy employed.CrazeeHorse - Thursday, April 29, 2004 - link
Belzer - Thursday, April 29, 2004 - link
"If you mean burn speed, of course it will be similar in different drives that use the same chipset, as their burn speeds are defined by the chipset!"Uhm, no! Burn speed also depends very much on the write strategies implemented in the firmware. For example NEC ND-2500A and Pioneer DVR-A07 use the same chipset. The NEC uses a 4x-6x-8x Z-CLV technique for 8x burns, the Pioneer uses a 6x-8x Z-CLV technique and is faster.
Drives with the same chipset can have very different properties, only complete rebadged drives will have the same properties.