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Sony was one of the founders of the DVD+RW format. Along with Philips, Sony rebelled against the DVD Forum insisting that the +RW format was better than the Forum ratified DVD-RAM and DVD-RW standards.
After years of promised launch dates, DVD+RW finally saw the light of day at the end of 2001, where it pretty much lived up to much of the pre-launch hype.

Things have moved on a bit now and the Sony DRU-510A supports both the +RW and the DVD-RW standards. Sony realised quite early on that there was more chance of getting the public to invest into the technology if they weren’t tied into one particular format. And so the ball started rolling, resulting in almost every DVD drive manufacturer producing multi-format drives.

It’s not easy to make an optical drive stand out from the crowd but Sony is well known for its design prowess. The DRU-510A is, it has to be said, a great looking unit, especially if you happen to own a silver or aluminium system case. The front fascia of the drive is constructed from the usual cream plastic, but the disc tray is a beautiful frosted silver, with a kind of offset mirror effect. It may only be a small point, but if you want your PC to look as good as it performs, this kind of attention to detail will probably be welcome.

Like the majority of DVD drives the Sony sports only a single button on its fascia for opening and closing the tray. The only other points of note are the status indicator LED and the ‘paperclip’ hole for manual eject.

At the rear of the drive things are similarly standard with a power connector, EIDE port, slave/master jumper and an audio output.

Addressing the plethora of write capabilities, the Sony will write DVD+RW discs at four-speed, DVD-RW discs at two-speed, DVD+R media at four-speed, DVD-R media at four-speed, CD-RW discs at 16-speed and finally CD-R discs at 24-speed. The drive will also read DVD-ROM discs at 12-speed and CD-ROMs at 32-speed.

So, there are some impressive sounding numbers there, but it’s how a drive performs in a real world environment that matters.

Unfortunately the Sony wasn’t impressive in the tests as it was to look at, finding itself near the bottom on many of the performance graphs. We were particularly surprised at how long it took to format a CD-RW disc, where the Sony was over two minutes slower than the next slowest drive. With this in mind we ran this test again, but the Sony turned in an almost identical time.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for the Sony. The +R/RW performance was pretty impressive, which is understandable considering Sony helped develop the format. So if you’re going to stick with the +R/RW format the performance will be acceptable. Also, it’s worth remembering that four-speed DVD+RW media wasn’t available at the time of testing, so the Sony would be even quicker with the right discs.

However, where the Sony really falls down is in the value stakes and at £158.63 it’s one of the most expensive drives on test. Of course it’s not as expensive as the Plextor, but then the Plextor is lightning fast and offers eight-speed DVD+R writing, even using four-speed media.

The software bundle is extensive but we would have traded some of it for a decent DVD/CD writing suite like Nero. Unfortunately Veritas RecordNow can’t compete with Nero when it comes to easy burning with extensive options. The Sonic MyDVD software is handy for those wishing to make DVD video discs though, and Cyberlink’s PowerDVD is definitely one of the better DVD playback applications.

Verdict

The Sony is, without a doubt, the best looking optical drive we’ve ever seen, but that beauty is only skin deep. Unfortunately the Sony can’t be recommended on price or performance.

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