Description
This is a used Sony NEC Optiarc AD7170A CD / DVD Rom Drive in good working condition. This is a Read/Write CD & DVD Drive.
Sony NEC Optiarc AD7170A
Sony NEC Optiarc is a joint venture that combines Sony’s and NEC’s optical disc drive (ODD) divisions. The new company was announced in February, 2005. Under the alliance, Sony and NEC work together in the development, design and marketing of optical data-storage disk drives. This includes rewritable CDs and DVDs.
The joint venture will replace both companies’ own activities in the optical disc market, at least for red laser drives. Here we review the first DVD burner from Sony NEC Optiarc Inc., the Optiarc AD-7170A. The drive offers the fastest available DVD recording speeds of 18x for SL and 8X for DL media, together with a high CD recording speed of 48x.
It also supports DVD-RAM, with the impressive recording speef of 12x. At an 18x writing speed for DVD-R / +R media, a 4.7GB compilation burns in around 5 minutes. Below is a summary of the specifications for this device.
Sony NEC Optiarc AD7170A Summary
The 12x DVD-RAM writing speed is supported with compliant media, currently announced from Maxell and Panasonic.
The drive reviewed here, the Optiarc AD 7170A, is the first to come from what should also prove a very fruitful collaboration between 2 of the giants in the optical drive industry, Sony and NEC.
Certainly, the DaTARIUS DVD Analyzer R 2x provides us with more detail than we have ever had in the past. It was interesting to see the results from CD Speed which in quite a few cases indicated much better results than the DaTARIUS system produced for several discs. But it should be remembered that the CD Speed tests were carried out with the Optiarc drive, so it is to be expected that the drive would be capable of reading its own burns.
Despite this, there were a couple of discs that produced read errors with CD Speed, namely Prodisc 16x DVD-R PRODISC S05 burned at 16x, and Ricoh 16x DVD+R RICOJPN R03 burned at 16x. All other discs produced either perfect or near perfect CD Speed graphs.
Objectivity
If we want a more objective picture regarding quality though, one that will more closely resemble what other drives, including desktop players will see, then we need to look at the DaTARIUS results. And here we find that the best media for this drive are:
- TTH01 DVD-R TTH01 burned at16x
- Optodisc 8x DVD-R OPTODICSR008 burned at 8x
- CMC Magnetics 8x DVD-R CMC MAG AE1 burned at 8x
- Verbatim 16x DVD+R MCC 004 burned at 18x
- Ridisc 8x DVD+R CMC MAG E01 burned at 8x
There were several good burns that unfortunately produced some POF errors. They include Datasafe 16x DVD-R TTH02 burned at18x, Datawrite Mach4 8x DVD-R INFODISC-R20 burned at 8x, Plextor 16x DVD+R YUDEN000 T03 burned at 18x, and Datawrite Titanium 8x DVD+R PRODISC R03 burned at12x.
In the main, we saw good quality burns, and 18x burning was surprisingly good.
The drive supports 16x max DVD reading speed, 18x max SL DVD and 8x max DL DVD writing speeds, as well as 12x max DVD RAM writing speed. It appears to be a good burner and reflects the quality of both Sony and NEC.
