Digital Trends

TDK AID+440BX

June 29th, 2003 | by Ian Bell

In our tests the TDK 440N beat out the Plextor PX-504A in about ever read and write test we did. SiSoftware Sandra showed the Plextor drive as having better results than the TDK transfer wise and the Nero DVD Speed CPU utilization test showed the Plextor as using less of our precious processor cycles. What is odd is that at the TDK 440N's max speed, CPU utilization shot up to 19%, more than 8% higher than the Plextor drive. This is not good to see, but at the same time we experienced no read or write errors with the drive while in use. Both the TDK 440N and the Plextor PX-504A showed to be neck and neck for most of the benchmarks, neither winner won by a sizable margin. Please click on the performance tab above and below this review to see complete testing results for the TDK 440N.

In DVD+RW performance the TDK 440N smoked the Plextor 504A by more than a minute in the directory write tests and close to a minute in the file write tests.

 Both drives showed above average write tests, but the 440N edged out the Plextor 504A by a slim margin on the directory tests.

The Plextor 504A does not support DVD-R/RW media thus the zero score in this benchmark. The TDK 440N certainly is not a great performer when it comes to writing DVD-R media compared to DVD+R media.

System Configurations:

Windows XP Pro; AMD Athlon 1700+; Abit AT7 Max 2 motherboard; 512MB DDR SDRAM 333MHz; Leadtek Geforce 4 MX video adapter.