Hammer Time!

I will admit that I hadn't seen a DVDRW drive by Pansonic in the states in quite some time. Well, they're being brought in by Hammer Storage. The drive reviewed is a "super drive" that features DVD-RAM support. Panasonic is generally known for supporting DVD-RAM, but it does not support DVD-R DL media, the latest standard. It features the Ulead storage software package.

The main negative points: The number one problem that we see with the Hammer Storage / Panasonic DVD drive is that the 16x DVD writing is horribly broken. Almost all discs that are burned at 16x result in incredibly high Parity Inner Failure errors reported on Kprobe scans and unuseable discs. We would also really like to see a 12x writing speed option available since the 12x writing quality is much better compared to 16x writing on this drive. The writing quality on DVD-R media needs improvement. The Digital Audio Extraction is slow compared to the competition. Double Layer DVD Video ripping is locked to 4x maximum.

To sum it all up, the best we could say is: “A fine drive for Double Layer burning or CD-R writing, but if you are interested in a drive that burns single layer DVD media at 16x with good quality, then you’ll have to look elsewhere.” Even though the drive is using a Z-CLV write strategy, it is surprisingly fast. It just does not create a useable disc at 16x. The writing quality at 12x and lower speeds is very good. The CD writing is good with a few exceptions. Panasonic could have a real winner here if they would commit to improving the firmware. Perhaps this is because of the chipset or perhaps they haven’t the desire to improve? We have reported the problems to Hammer Storage / Panasonic and we truly hope that a future firmware can improve the writing quality.

It looks like they still have some "tweaking" to do, like building a better drive.