BenQ DW-224E

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BenQ DW-224E

Ameya Dalvi, Apr 26, 2005 1616 hrs IST

The DW-224E is a 24x/24x/24x/8x CD/DVD combo drive

Sleek design, Good software bundle, Good build quality, well priced.

Below par performance, Lack of support for DVD+R/RW media.

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Last month we tested the sleek Asus external combo drive. This month we will have a closer look at its BenQ counterpart.

The BenQ DW-224E External USB 2.0 drive is not as sleek as the Asus but by no means can it be termed as bulky. It measures 14 x 15 x 2.1 cm (LxBxD) and weighs about 450 grams. The drive looks cool in twin shades of black and metallic grey with a tinge of blue. No points for guessing that I am no artist when it comes to describing the perfect shade of color. However that won t really matter in this review. Coming back to the drive, there is a Read/Write LED along with the eject button at the front of the drive while the USB and power sockets can be found at the back of the drive. The power LED is placed at the top of the drive.

The package comprised of the power adapter, a USB cable, an instructions manual and a software CD along with the drive itself. The bundled software includes Nero Express 6, InCD 4, Nero Vision Express 2 SE, Nero ShowTime, Nero Media Player, Nero Toolkit and Nero Cover Designer. A pretty comprehensive bundle so to speak.

The functional specifications of the drive were similar to the Asus combo drive or for that matter most of the slim external combo drives available in the market. It is capable of reading, writing and rewriting CDs at 24X, while it can read DVDs at 8X. As soon as I connected the drive, it got detected as a TEAC DW-224E thus disclosing information about its OEM. However, there was no need to install any drivers for it in Windows XP SP1. I ran our usual sets of benchmarks and following are the results.

Before we proceed to the performance tests, let s have a quick look at the Nero Info Tool screen. It tells us that this drive isn t capable of reading DVD+R/RW media. Now that s not good news because there are dozens of brands in the local market selling DVD+R media. So it is mandatory for all drives to be able to read those media.