Last time, in our lab we tested also a drive produced by MSI. It was the Combo drive MS-8448M. Both MSI MS-8448M and MSI XA52P S-ATA are innovative and very well equipped. We have the possibility to change the front panel, so we can match drive look to our PC. Panels are very easy to change thanks to the ActivePanel technology. In the box there are three panels: a black, a white and a silver one. At the first look we don?t see on the front panel any LED informing on the drive state. The LED is hidden under a transparent open/close button and it shines green during reading CD and red while recording CDRW or reading DVD.
Another noticeable thing is the LiveUpdate 3 program - a solution known to many MSI mother-boards and graphic cards users. This drive is also equipped with the ABS technology (Anti Bumping System). ABS prevents from vibrations. Another technology - Soft Burn is designed to make the drive more silent. Hyper Guard ensures a correct recording.
The S-ata optical drive was then connected to the mainboard. Fortunately we had an Intel 865PE chipset mainboard, one of the quite few supported chipsets. It is definitely a disadvantage, that drives do not support any chipset for AMD processors. But in our case the drives started to work without any problem.
At the very beginning of our tests we observed a feature, that limits the drive read speed to 40x - that can be very useful when we read e.g. low quality media that could crash inside the drive at high speed. When, after closing the tray, you push the open/close button during about 3 seconds, this limitation is disabled and the 52x speed is available
Nero CD-DVD speed graphs show that the drive can read very fast 650 MB and 700 MB CDs as well as pressed single and dual layer DVDs. ?Oversized? media ( 800 Mb and 870 MB) were read visibly slower, during all the reading process. Recordable DVD media were read without any problems. Our test DVD RW media were read correctly till the end - but with some minor complications.
During audio data extraction, we noticed several errors. The EAC software ripped audio tracks rather slowly. Another disadvantage for 'music fans' is that this drive can't extract audio CDs protected with CDS2000. Nevertheless, the Key2Audio didn't cause any problem.
As we noticed many errors during the audio extraction, we could suspect a quite weak error correction mechanism while reading data CDs - and we were right. The drive has good/short access times when reading non-protected CDs. About protected CDs, drive managed well with SecuROM (less than 2 minutes), but SafeDisc 2 and LaserLock were much worse (16 minutes 34 seconds and 24 minutes 41 seconds)
We succeed to create, working 1:1 copy of a CD protected with SafeDisc 2.60. We noticed that drive supports recording with 52 x speed in CAV mode, and it was made in relatively short time. CD-RW recording in P-CAV mode was very efficient - 650MB lasted 3 minutes 25 seconds. Drive can fill a full 99 minutes medium. The drive records CD-R with a really good quality. Our test media were recorded with very few C1 errors and of course without C2.
Advantages:
- comfortable in use S-ATA interface (narrow cable, no jumpers)
- high read speed of pressed DVDs
- high quality CDR recording - thanks to Hyper Guard technology
- maximum recording speed of most of existing media
- supports read and write 99 minutes media
- supports SafeDisc v.2.0 to v2.8
- supports reading Key2Audio protected media
- really silent drive thanks to ABS (Anti-Bumping System) and SoftBurn technologies
- easy to perform firmware update thanks to Live Update 3
- the drive is shorter than typical drives
Disadvatages:
- supports only few chipsets: Intel 875P / 865PE / 865G / 865GV / 865P / 848P
- doesn't support PCI S-ATA controllers
- low quality and speed of audio data read/extraction
- doesn't support for CDS200
So that's the end of our first review in English. We hope it was not so bad as for the first time and you have enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions or comments please do not hesitate and feel free to contact us.
Kind regards
CDRinfo.pl Staff
Photos taken with camera provided by: MSI.
Summary