Pioneer DVR-110 review

From the outside, Pioneer's DVR-110 is beige and unremarkable.

It's an internal IDE drive, so you'll need a 5in drive bay spare and an IDE connector free on your motherboard. Unfortunately, no software is supplied, so you'll have to spend another £40 or so on something like Roxio's excellent Creator 8.

The Pioneer is one of the fastest rated drives we have ever seen in the Buyer labs and is capable of writing to both double- and dual-layer discs at a whopping 8x speed. That's fast.

Well it would be if we could actually get it to work. Our 8x rated Verbatim DVD+R DL discs were only recognised at a snail-like 2.4x. Strangely our 4x rated DVD-R DL discs were recognised as being capable of 8x speed and the DVR-110 filled one in an impressive 18 minutes flat.

The Pioneer also claims to be able to complete both DVD+RW and DVD-RW rewriteable discs at 8x speed, but we couldn't find any discs to test it with - these aren't yet widely available. A 6x DVD-RW disc was completed at its rated 6x speed in a snappy 10 minutes and 20 seconds, though. DVD-R and DVD+R discs were written in just 15 and 21 seconds over six minutes respectively. This is up with the fastest drives about.

The DVR-110 is no slouch, but considering its lack of CD writing software, its not as good value as our Best Buy DVD writer, the Lite-On SOHW-1693S-23C. This may not be capable of writing discs quite as quickly as the Pioneer, but it costs the same and comes with a copy of the excellent Nero OEM suite. It's also a lot less fussy about the discs it will write to. At the time of review, the Pioneer would only offcially work at its top speeds with Ricoh DVD discs, and not other more widely available media.

If you already have software capable of writing DVD discs and you need the fastest drive currently available, then the Pioneer is the fastest drive we've seen, but its pickiness about the discs it accepts is a major problem. Until this is sorted out, we can't recommend the DVR-110.