Refine search for Storage

  Leave a comment      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge

DVD writers aren’t the most exciting products to look at, and doing group tests on internal drives can sometimes leave me searching for minute physical differences in each product. Thankfully, when it comes to external drives, manufacturers can be a little more adventurous with the design, and the HP dvd420e is testament to this.

Unlike many external DVD writers that look like an internal drive that’s been shoved in a caddy, the HP dvd420e looks a bit more individual. The casing is finished in matt black and silvery metallic blue, and it has to be said, it looks pretty stylish overall. The casing is more rounded than most external drives I’ve seen, and although I like the way it looks, it means that the HP isn’t best suited to sideways mounting.

At the front you’ll find a silvery/blue eject button, an indicator light and a manual eject hole. At the rear is the power socket, a USB 2.0 port and two FireWire ports, allowing you to connect another FireWire device and pass the signal through the dvd420e. There’s also a sliding cover that allows you to connect a USB 2.0 cable while covering the FireWire ports, or to connect a FireWire cable while covering the USB 2.0 port.

The dvd420e is on par with all the internal DVD writers in the group test I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Specification wise you get eight-speed performance when writing the DVD+R and DVD-R discs and four-speed performance when writing to DVD+RW and DVD-RW media. When writing CD media, you’ll get 24-speed performance from CD-R discs and 10-speed from CD-RW discs.

In the box you’ll find the drive itself, along with an external power brick and mains cable. For connectivity HP has bundled both USB 2.0 and FireWire cables. The FireWire cable is a standard six-pin to six-pin version, so you’re unlikely to connect via FireWire to most notebooks. That said, you should be able to find a USB 2.0 port on modern notebooks. HP has also supplied two pieces of blank media – an eight-speed DVD+R disc and a four-speed DVD+RW disc.

To get you started there’s a fold-out quick-start guide with clear illustrations. The software suite looks generous on the surface, but RecordNow! is no substitute for a copy of Nero. You also get ShowBiz 2 and PhotoBase from ArcSoft, Simple Backup, PowerDVD and Muvee. Muvee is a pretty cool application that will help create reasonably professional looking home videos with basic effects and soundtracks.

Getting the dvd420e setup and ready to burn was a breeze, and Windows had no problem detecting the drive. Four rubber feet raise the unit off the desk and negate the kind of annoying vibrations that plague some external drives.

Looking at the performance results you can see that the USB 2.0 interface is not a bottleneck for DVD writing. The times turned in by the HP are pretty much on par with all the internal drives I looked at in the last group test.

Because I flashed a new firmware into the Sony to enable eight-speed DVD-R and four-speed DVD-RW, I also flashed the latest firmware into the HP to make sure that the playing field was level. However, after running all the tests again the times were identical, showing that the new firmware doesn’t offer any tangible performance increases. I also ran a couple of the tests over the FireWire interface, but again the times were more or less the same, which is understandable.

On the whole, the HP is a great external DVD writer, and even after the firmware on the Sony was flashed, the HP still managed a better overall performance result, despite the Sony’s lightning fast DVD+R writing.

But it’s not just the design and performance that make the HP a better proposition than the Sony, it’s also the price. With a street price of £158.14 the HP dvd420e offers great value for money and undercuts the Sony by over £40.

Verdict

HP has produced an excellent external DVD writer. The performance outstrips all the internal drives in our recent group test and you get the flexibility of being able to move it between PCs. Add to this the amazing price and it looks like HP has the external DVD market sewn up.

Add your comment