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When I reviewed the MSI DR8-A a couple of months back I gave it an Editor’s Choice award since it offered superb performance at a good price. Time has now moved on a bit and the competition has caught up, with eight-speed writing now being the norm rather than the exception. Now, the DR8-A could only write at eight-speed to DVD+R media, but the DR8-A2 is a bit more accomplished.

Like all the drives on test, the DR8-A2 will write at eight-speed to both DVD-R and DVD+R media. DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs can be written at four-speed and CD-R and CD-RW media can be burned at 40-speed and 24-speed respectively.

When I received this drive I thought that MSI had made a mistake and sent me back the old DR8-A, because the packaging was identical and stated a DVD-R write performance of four-speed. However, on closer inspection I noticed that the DR8-A model name had been covered up with a sticker saying DR8-A2. It was the same with the drive itself which also had the DR8-A label covered with a sticker saying DR8-A2. Now, logic dictates that this is probably a DR8-A drive that’s had a firmware upgrade to allow it to write DVD-R at eight-speed and DVD-RW at four-speed. So, if you already have a DR8-A you might be able to upgrade it to DR8-A2 status, although I can’t swear to that of course.

Inside the retail box you’ll find a copy of Nero 5.5, PowerDVD for DVD movie playback, ShowBiz for video editing and Sonic MyDVD for authoring your own DVD discs. You also get a quick installation guide, an audio cable and some mounting screws. Unfortunately there’s no IDE cable included. You also get one piece of DVD+R media in the box to get you going.

There’s a 2MB data buffer in the DR8-A2 which is more than enough considering it also incorporates Burn-Proof technology to guard against buffer under run issues. The DR8-A2 will happily write at eight-speed to four-speed DVD+R media, but it can’t manage the same trick using DVD-R discs.

The front fascia is fully featured with buttons for Stop/Eject and Play/Skip. There is also a headphone socket and volume wheel to enable CD playback without using any software. Of course this functionality was far more useful before we all started ripping our CDs and keeping all the music on our hard disks. Finally there’s an indicator light and manual eject hole.

In the performance tests the MSI was middle of the pack in the DVD-R and DVD-RW tests, but using DVD+R media it dropped to the bottom – although it’s worth noting that there’s only around 30 seconds between top and bottom. Switching to DVD+RW resulted in the MSI regaining its middle table spot, although it grabbed the top position for the DVD+RW format test. With CD-R media the DR8-A2 grabbed third place in both tests, while rather bizarrely it grabbed top spot in the CD-RW write test, but last place in the CD-RW format test.

With a price of £72.56 including VAT for the full retail bundle, the MSI is certainly a tempting prospect, although AOpen offers better performance at an even lower price.

Verdict

The MSI DR8-A2 is a well featured drive with a decent bundle. The performance is reasonable although not outstanding, but the price more than makes up for the extra 30 second wait in some tests. If it wasn’t for the AOpen drive, MSI could have walked away with an award.

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