Despite sitting in third place for write speeds and fourth overall for the read portion of our testing, this drive has a couple of trump cards up its sleeves.

The first Blu-ray drive to actually BE available in Australia. The massive price should fall quickly.

Although lacking the additional functions of some of the more expensive burners such as the ability to write at the faster 16-speed, burn DVD-RAM or pack 8.5GB onto a single dual layer disc - what the Optorite does is provide all the basic DVD plus and minus burning you’re likely to need without having to fork over a sizable fistful of cash to do it.

Much more efficient at reading CDs than writing them, Optorite took second place in our read tests, pipped by the Imation by a mere three seconds.

The most expensive DVD burner we received, it makes sense it would also be the best featured.

Like Samsung, Aopen’s trump card is their ridiculously low price; a CD writer at $49 is pretty hard to beat.

The Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Digital DVDXRW1248-069 was the clear winner out of all of the DVD burners we tested in this roundup. It had the performance, the features, and the value for money to easily stand out.

Second most expensive, Ricoh’s MP5316DA burner really has something to crow about, packing all the major DVD standards in DVD+/-RW support as well as dual layer functionality.

A little slower than its 12x and 16x counterparts, this is another DVD-RAM supportive drive and it ships with three RAM discs and a copy of Nero Express to have you up and burning right out of the box.

Like the ASUS CRW5232AS, the Imation drive is slightly shorter than standard full length optical drives by approximately an inch, making it ideal for small form factor cases.

Samsung’s claim to fame with this drive is it’s slightly above average value for money score; priced at just $199 it represents good value and was only beaten by both award winners the Mitsubishi and Optorite for cost.

Strongest in the performance stakes, this drive managed to take fourth place for burn speed and second place for disc read time.

One of the plainer drives, it lacks a front audio adjustment dial or headphone socket, but does deliver on fast CD writing without too much damage to your wallet.

This unit plays more than just your rental movies and existing DVD discs, it's also capable of VBR MP3, WMA, JPEG, PhotoCD, HDCD Xvid, AVI, MPEG layers 1, 2, and 4 play, the latter of which is more commonly referred to as DivX, named after the compression codec.

The second highest performer over all, the Plextor was the only submitted drive to support DVD writing higher than 4x, boasting an incredible 8x DVD+R burning capability

Boasting a two-year warranty, LG's offering to the DVD market is a mixed one in that what it lacks in burn speed it more than makes up for in its writable formats.

The AOpen DRW4410 performed on average in both performance and features, dropping a few positions given its rather expensive price tag for a single format writer.

Identified during installation by the operating system as a Pioneer DVR-A06P, this unit was later confirmed to be an OEM version of the same drive. Both feature a circular air vent on the rear of the chassis, designed to allow for optimum airflow while in operation.

Sold as an OEM drive, the NEC ND-1300A lacks packaging, writable media or anything in the way of included software, yet rated quite well in our performance testing and comes in at a reasonable price of $400.

One of only two external DVD writers submitted for testing this month, this multi-format drive has you covered for all your archive and burning needs.