ASUS DRW-1814BLT 18x DVD Writer (SATA)

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Not for the first time, manufacturers have gone ahead with the hardware, regardless of whether there is sufficient support for the product. In this case, 18x certified DVD media is extremely rare and you will have to hope that the 16x media you bought can be written at 18x. As for 14x DVD-RAM media, that's probably even more rare so to the majority of users it is unfortunately a meaningless number. As we found out, there are some 16x media out there that can be oversped to 18x write speeds using the ASUS DRW-1814BLT but we have had no luck with our own. The only consolation is that the media included by ASUS in its package should be capable of writing at 18x speed, so at least you have got a Disc ID (MCC004) to go by if you decide to search for such high speed media.

As for the SATA interface used by the ASUS DRW-1814BLT, we doubt that there is any significant difference in performance at the moment. While SATA provides a higher data transfer rate than IDE, this will probably be shown in slightly faster burst speeds and given the larger onboard memory buffers on DVD writers nowadays, this is highly unlikely to affect writing performance. Our tests also show that if anything, the DRW-1814BLT was slower than quite a few other competitors and its main advantage as a DVD writer could lie in its versatility and the associated advantages of SATA rather than its raw performance. The relatively high rate of CPU usage in Nero also seems to suggest that this drive may still be quite rough around the edges and ASUS may look into improving this aspect of the drive.