CDRLabs have posted another great DVD writer review, this time on BTC's DRW1008IM 8x DVD�RW drive. Here's a snippet from the review:

For a budget priced drive, BTC's new 8x DVD�RW delivers a surprising number of features. The drive supports most CD and DVD formats and offers some pretty impressive specs. The DRW1008IM sports 8x DVD+R, 4x DVD-R/DVD+RW and 2x DVD-RW writing speeds as well as a maximum DVD read speed of 12x. While it is lacking support for the Mt. Rainier format, the drive also has features like a 2MB buffer as well as support for things like Super Link buffer underrun protection. BTC tops all of this off with an impressive software bundle from Roxio and CyberLink.

Like the other dual format DVD writers we've looked at lately, the DRW1008IM can write to DVD+R media at 8x. While this looks good on paper, the drive did not perform as well as I had expected. In our tests, the DRW1008IM trailed behind the competition, taking almost 10 minutes to write 4GB of data. BTC's new drive did much better when writing to other types of recordable DVD media. In fact, the DRW1008IM had some of the fastest writing times I've seen with DVD-R and DVD-RW media.

Reading DVD's wasn't a problem for the DRW1008IM either. While its seek times were not as low as we would have liked, the drive was able to read both single layer DVD-ROM's and DVD-Videos at 12x. The DRW1008IM also read dual layer, DVD-R and DVD+R discs at an impressive 8x, but slowed to 6x when reading DVD-RW and DVD+RW media.

While BTC has been shipping their new DVD writer for a couple of months now, it is not easy to find. After doing a few searches on the web, I could not find any vendors here in the US or in Canada offering the retail version of the drive. On the other hand, I/OMagic and Micro Advantage do use the DRW1008IM in their drive kits. The drives from both companies are easy to find and can usually be picked up at a reasonable price.