Digital Trends

Pioneer DVR-S606

November 2nd, 2003 | by Ian Bell

Use and Testing

The first thing you should know is that the DVR-S606 is not the fastest external writer on the market, but it is pretty close. In our writing tests is trailed the Plextor 708UF by a very small margin, but in our other tests, it often lead both the Plextor 708UF and 504UF drives both in read and seek time performance. CPU usage was significantly lower than both Plextor drives despite having the same 2MB buffer.

We had no trouble installing the DVR-S606 using either the FireWire or USB interfaces. Windows XP recognized the drive right away and installed the appropriate drivers. We did not test this unit on Windows 2000, 98 or Apple operating systems. If you have tried this drive on an Apple system and know that the latest Roxio TOAST recording software will support it, please post a mention of this in our forums or under the user review section of this review.

Even though Pioneer does not mention any sort of “burn proof” technology on their drive, we failed to burn a single bad disc from the 4 different brands of media we used. We also experience no problems multi-tasking. We were able to check e-mail and surf the web while recording media with no problems.. The DVR-S606 really excelled at recording audio CD's when compared to the two other test drives.  

Please click on the performance tab and link located at the top and bottom of this review for benchmarking results.  

Conclusion

Pioneer's DVR-S606 has what a lot of other DVD writers on the market seem to be lacking; substance. While the DVR-S606 is not the fastest DVD writer on the market, you really get a lot for your money. The Pioneer DVR-S606 has a good software package, USB and FireWire cables that support both the larger and mini inputs (found on most notebook computers), and both write-once and rewritable media boxed with the drive; not to mention FireWire pass through for daisy chaining devices. The DVR-S606 looks great, is incredibly quiet and seems to be well thought through. The only improvement we would like to see is support for Apple's operating systems. So before purchasing a DVD writer based solely on its writing speed, ask yourself if an extra minute is really worth purchasing an 8X external drive over the DVR-S606; if it is, then you will be sorry.