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Looking at the Sony DRX-530UL, you can plainly see that you’re getting a standard internal IDE drive that’s been mounted into an external caddy. Of course the HP dvd420e is also an internal drive in an external case, but some effort has been made to make it look like a custom unit. That said, the Sony does have the advantage of being able to be mounted sideways. There are two, thick rubber feet on both sides of the case, allowing it to be positioned on either side. When placed on its side the unit is quite solid, although I have to say that I prefer the look of it when sitting flat.

Now, when it comes to specifications, this drive will write DVD+R discs at eight-speed, DVD+RW discs at four-speed, DVD-R discs at four-speed and DVD-RW discs at two-speed. When it comes to CD media though, the Sony streaks through CD-R burns at 40-speed and whizzes through CD-RW writing at 24-speed.

But it’s the slow DVD-R/RW specification that holds this drive back, especially since rival units like the HP dvd420e sport specs twice as fast. It was clear from testing that the Sony was going to be truly outclassed in the performance arena, but I thought I’d do a little digging around the Internet before writing the DRX-530UL off completely.

After a brief amount of searching I managed to find an updated firmware for the Sony that bumped up the rather disappointing four-speed DVD-R and two-speed DVD-RW specification to eight-speed and four-speed respectively.

With the firmware update in place, the performance on the Sony turned around completely. In fact the DVD+R times were the fastest I’ve seen on any drive, but despite this, the HP still completed all the tests ten seconds faster. But, to be fair, a ten second difference on a suite of tests that takes over three hours to complete is pretty negligible. As well as the DVD+R speeds, the CD-R/RW performance was also first rate, beating the HP on all the tests.

But when it comes to performance, what really surprised me was that the Sony managed to write faster via FireWire than it did via USB 2.0. Now, there’s no reason why this should be so, because neither interface is a bottleneck, so the performance should be dependant on the drive. But nonetheless, the Sony turned in an incredibly fast time of seven minutes 41 seconds when burning the 4.3GB MPEG 2 file to DVD+R media. I was so surprised by this result that I ran the test again, but the time was equally as fast. Even more strange is the fact that the performance advantage using FireWire was only evident when using DVD+R media, since using other media resulted in times identical to USB 2.0.

The drive itself is cream, with a silver finish to the tray. There’s a single eject button below the tray, along with an indicator light and a manual eject hole. At the rear is a power switch, a power socket, a USB 2.0 port and two FireWire ports to allow for connection to a PC and pass-through to another FireWire device.

In the box you get a power brick and mains cable, a USB 2.0 cable, a six-pin to six-pin FireWire cable and a four-pin to six-pin FireWire cable. The latter is particularly useful if you want to use this drive with a notebook, since most notebooks use the smaller four-pin FireWire connector. Although almost any notebook will also have a USB 2.0 port.

The software bundle is pretty much par for the course, although as with the HP, I would have rather seen a copy of Nero than Sonic RecordNow! You also get Quick Archive for backups, Sonic MyDVD for authoring, MyDVD Video Editor and PowerDVD for playback. There’s also a copy of MusicMatch for ripping and maintaining your music library, which is a decent inclusion. There’s no blank media in the box, so you’ll have to buy some separately before you can get going.

Like the HP, the Sony is faster than all the internal drives I tested in the recent group test. It’s a little bit slower than the HP overall, but those positions would probably reverse if I retested using the FireWire interface instead of USB 2.0. Ultimately though, it’s the high price that puts the Sony out of the running. With a street price of £199.75, the Sony is significantly more expensive than the HP, and let’s not forget that it’s selling as a four-speed DVD-R and two-speed DVD-RW drive.

Verdict

The Sony DRX-530UL is a decent external DVD writer, and once you’ve flashed the new firmware it’s a very fast drive too. If you’re writing a lot of DVD+R media you’ll be happy with performance, and if you’re writing DVD+R via FireWire you’ll be even happier. But, the high cost makes the Sony a far less compelling option than the HP dvd420e.

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