MSI DR8-A: The Plextor 708A's little brother
by Kristopher Kubicki on April 7, 2004 11:05 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Tech Support
One key item that we have overlooked in most of our optical display reviews is technical support. Our very our Evan Lieb pioneered the original tech support benchmark for motherboards and today, we will attempt to replicate that benchmark with our optical storage vendors.We used three camouflaged email addresses and emailed particularly trivial questions concerning our burners to each vendor. If tech support was capable of responding to all 3 emails within 72 hours (5 business days), we averaged the three times together for a final result. Our original results from the last DVDR Roundup combined with the DR8-A are below:
| Average Customer Support Response Time | |
| ASUS (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| Gigabyte (Dec 2003) | 38 hours, 12 minutes |
| LiteOn (Dec 2003) | 41 hours, 20 minutes |
| MSI (Dec 2003) | No Response |
| MSI (Mar 2004) | 27 hours, 11 minutes |
| NEC (Dec 2003) | 29 hours, 48 mintues |
| Nu Tech (Dec 2003) | N/A |
| Plextor (Dec 2003) | 11 hours, 10 minutes |
| Sony (Dec 2003) | 6 hours, 44 minutes |
When inquiring about our DR8-A, we received much better response than our original inquiry with the DR4-A in December of 2003. We also found better help on the MSI support center; it looks like our comments from the last DVD roundup may have caused them to improve their customer support. Even though MSI has been downsizing recently, it is good to see that they are still improving their customer support, doing more with less.
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jonahXP - Thursday, April 15, 2004 - link
"Before our 8x dual DVD roundup..."When will this article be online? I'm looking forward to reading it before I buy a DVD burner.
richardkenward - Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - link
I bought one of these drives in the UK a month ago and had nothing but trouble from the start and MSI were no help. On Verbatum data life CD's it starts writing about 1cm from the centre. I write image files on this writer and want them to be read on both PC's and Macs. The CD's have been unreliable on the PC's and failed on the Mac...well only a few images open then one will totally lock it up. The write veridfication always shows up errors. A trial DVD write was sucesssful but took perhaps an hour to complete!Tried a TDK R74 CD and the write started in the centre but the image files opened sooo slowly on the MSI drive, and the CD was not seen at all on the Mac! BTW latest firmware was installed and no improvement seen.
Supplier has sent a replacement and much the same result. Has suggested that I need to update the Chipset on the M board and install SP 4 inplace of 3 on the win2k computer I am using with the MSI drive. Surely this should not be necessary? BTW this box has been running a PlextorW2410TA perfectly for ages, and was only changed to get the facility to burn DVD's.
Thanks for reading. Any help would be appreciated.
Ian@CDRlabs - Sunday, April 11, 2004 - link
You had it finished back in February? Why the wait?KristopherKubicki - Sunday, April 11, 2004 - link
Lan,We had the review finished before the 130D firmware came out. We have a nice sized roundup coming up with the MSI retested at the new firmware.
Krisotpher
Ian@CDRlabs - Friday, April 9, 2004 - link
After reading it over, I have a couple of other comments.While MSI claims that the DR8-A supports 99 minute discs, it really doesn't. It can recognize discs up to 93:58 in size and overburn to about that limit as well.
Kristopher you also make it sound like the NEC 2500A cannot write to 4x DVD+R media at 8x. It can.. just not as well as some drives, like the DR8-A.
Any reason why you didn't use the 130D firmware?
Ian@CDRlabs - Friday, April 9, 2004 - link
ViRGE brings up a good point. However, the error correction HD-Burn uses is not CIRC (nor is it overburning). It's a more efficient algorythm that requires less disc space for error correction info. Even then, I do have to agree with some of the people at CD Freaks. The quality of the written data is questionable with some media.KristopherKubicki - Friday, April 9, 2004 - link
Virge: Youre not really halving the error correction, youre halving the tolerance for error. However, this isnt much different than people who overburn their CDs either. In some cases it may make more sense.Whether you want to use it or not is entirely determined by the user of course. For noncritical data, it is a nice convienence.
Kristopher
MadAd - Thursday, April 8, 2004 - link
I take it HD-Burn disks will only play in compliant drives and not in any old cd-rom? I cant seem to find the answer on any of the links given.#3 ... Perhaps half the error correction wouldnt be so bad if we are talking about cds of mp3s?
ViRGE - Thursday, April 8, 2004 - link
I don't think it's really a good idea to call HD-Burn a good feature on this drive. Why? Take a look at this post from CD-Freaks(http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/6823)HD-Burn will just *halve* the pit length on the CD, so double the data (and effectively half the error correction).
Now I don't know about you, but CDs are bad enough as is as far as integrity goes. I'm not about to try to halve the error correction, even for another 700MB of space.
kuk - Thursday, April 8, 2004 - link
I'm afraid of Mr. CD-R ... I think he'll eat my CD collection at night.