Digital Trends

Sony DRU-700A

September 1st, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Features and Design

Sony's DRU-700A was released back in May of this year; a little bit after the DVD+DL (dual-layer) specification was approved, and was supposedly the first dual layer DVD writer to hit the U.S. Market. Philips actually had developed the first dual layer DVD writer, but Sony's DRU-700A was first to actually hit the store shelves. In any case, we are glad to see that the Dual Layer specification is picking up a lot of support. What troubles us though is that the first generation of dual layer write speeds are excruciatingly slow, reaching only a maximum 2.4x write speed.

The DRU-700A looks nearly identical to the Sony DRU-530A drive we reviewed back in February of this year. The faceplate appears to be the same as is the styling of the box, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. We found the styling of the DRU-530A to be above average and representative of Sony as a brand. Sony has, however, gone one step further and decided to include interchangeable faceplates with the DRU-700A package. The drive comes with the standard silver and blue faceplate and also includes a black face, allowing it to match a black computer chassis. This is a pretty smart move on Sony's part and we have seen Plextor do the same thing with their new drives as well. There are no volume controls or a headphone jack on the front of the drive, so if for some reason you are used to using these features, you will have to give this luxury up.

As is standard with almost all optical drives, the tray eject button and activity LED is located in the front bottom right corner. Sony includes an IDE cable, quick start guide and instruction manual, but does not include an analog audio cable or any sort of writable media.

On the software front, Sony has decided to ditch the Sonic brand of DVD/CD recording software in favor of the more popular Nero software suite. This includes Nero burning ROM 6 SE which is used to create data and music discs as well perform as basic CD/DVD duplication, InCD 4 which is a DVD+/-RW and CD-RW packet writing software, Nero Vision Express 2 which is used for DVD-Video and Video CD authoring and editing, Nero Back It Up which allows you to back up your computers main files onto CD or DVD. Lastly, Sony includes Nero's Showtime software which is used to play DVD video and video CD's on your PC.

For read and write specifications, the DRU-700A is fast, but not the fastest available. As has been the case lately, once the review sites get the drives in to test, the manufacturers are already announcing faster products. Write speeds include 8X DVD+R, 4X DVD+RW, 8X DVD-R, 4X DVD-RW, 40X CD-R, 24X CD-RW and 2.4X DVD+R DL write speeds. Read speeds are rated at 12X for DVD-ROM, and 40X for CD-ROM media

The Sony DRU-700A features a 2MB internal buffer and incorporates PowerBurn technology into the DRU-700A to help prevent buffer underruns errors. The DRU-700A is only compatible with Windows based systems and requires a minimum of an Intel Pentium III 800 MHz CPU or equivalent, 128MB of memory and Windows 2000 or XP operating systems.

Sony offers a one-year limited warranty with the DRU-700A which includes 90 days of toll-free technical support available Monday through Saturday 8AM to 8PM Central Standard Time. Sony also offers Website technical support 24 hours a day 7 days a week.