Pioneer is clearly the king of the DVD Mountain. They are not only the first to market with a 10x DVD-ROM drive (in no less than two flavors – a slot-load and a tray-load version), they are the only company making a rewritable drive that DVD developers can test their titles with (we refer to the DVR-S201 DVD Rewritable drive, which is the only one capable of burning DVD discs readable in every existing DVD-ROM drive and consumer DVD player on the market). And with the announcement of a consumer DVD recorder, they’re pushing the industry again. While other drive manufacturers like Sony, Toshiba and LG are just now unveiling their mighty 8X DVD-ROM drives, only Pioneer and Acer are hitting the coveted 10X speed. Also, the Pioneer drive hits the street at around $100, but be careful as sites and retailers are quickly running out of back stock. ESBUY.COM may be your sure thing since they are the distributor of ALL of these Pioneer drives and Guarantee they’ll be in stock. The sure thing is going to cost you about $130, but you’ll be getting CyberLink’s PowerDVD decoding software along with it. They’ll be offering bare drives for $100 very shortly.

 Pioneer’s 10x DVD drive is based on CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) technology. This drive’s top speeds (10x DVD or 32x CD-ROM) are only achieved when reading the outside edges of a full CD or DVD disc. Typically, you’ll only see the average read speeds of CAV drives which, at least for this drive, are in the 6x range for DVD media and 27x with CD-ROM media. All DVD drives currently use CAV technology. Keep in mind that the averages for this 10x drive is higher than those of the current 6x drives or even 8x that have flooded the market. These technologies will fall under the PCEXTREMIST microscope in an upcoming Tech Doc.

 Other technologies include a built-in low vibration mechanism that smoothes the playback of even the poorest media, so there’s no worry about off-balanced media throwing the spindle out of alignment and lowering the drive’s throughput accordingly. We tested this with some poor media we tossed around the lab and they played just fine. No off-balanced shaky clothes-dryer flashbacks in this drive’s firmware! Resulting in fewer coasters for the coffee table.

 DVD-RAM media is still not supported. This is to be expected. Pioneer doesn’t dabble in the DVD-RAM arena. And why should they, the Pioneer DVR-S201, at 10 times the price, is far more advanced and compatible with other DVD technologies. And since DVD-RAM is still very much in its infancy, commanding only a small install-base, we don’t consider its absence important enough to detract from the drive’s rating.

 Pioneer knows consumers are finicky about drives, so DVD-ROM drive – a slot-loading version dubbed the DVD-104S and they offer two models of their 10x the DVD-114 tray-loading version. The only difference between them, aside from the loading mechanism, is a digital audio output alongside the standard analog audio output in the slot-version. We had the opportunity, so we tested both. Currently, both versions are only available in an ATAPI-4, UltraDMA/33 interface, although a SCSI version of the drive will become available sometime around Christmas.

 We used the reigning champion and our previous favorite DVD drive, the Pioneer 6x SCSI, as the one to beat. As expected, the 10x drives ate it for lunch. It was nice to see that Pioneer was able to shave 40ms off the full stroke access time. Too bad they couldn’t do the same for the random access times. Burst speeds shot up dramatically. This is most likely due to a newer firmware that utilizes the onboard buffer more intelligently than the previous generation’s firmware.