CD CAPABILITIES P2

90min & 99min CDRs

90min CD-Rs

We next examined the drive's ability to handle 90 and 99min CD-Rs:

(This test demands two things: approved media and a drive that's capable of overburning in DAO mode. We used Nero CD Speed to simulate writing to an 80min+ Mirror Max CD-R.

Overburning stores data in the leadout area and this area - according to the redbook - contains nothing but zeros (90 seconds in length). Overburning will use this leadout to illegally store data.)

The Pioneer does support 90min CDs and during the overburning test, it managed to write up to 93mins and 04 secs (on the 80min plus disk). It could only write up to this capacity when we used a slower writing speed (in this case at 8x speed rather than its top speed).

99min CD-Rs

Writing

Next we examined how Pioneer's new drive handled writing to 99min CD-Rs:

Like the A04, the A05 is good at overburning and managed to write a full 99mins of data (at x16 speed).

Reading

In this test we used the 99min which we had created in the previous test and also a disk which had been produced by the DVR-A04 (and verified):

Unlike the previous model, this drive had major problems reading certain types of CD-Rs - it could not read back what it had written and also failed to read a disk that had been created with the A04.

CloneCD

CloneCD is a popular program for backing up protected CDs. We checked the capabilities of the drive under CloneCD:

The older DVR-A04 could not write in any DAO-RAW modes but Pioneer have fixed this problem and it is now compatible with CloneCD (to a certain extent).

Reading

We checked the read performance with some popular Safedisk 2 protected games: MaxPayne & Serious Sam: 2nd Encounter. Intelligent Bad Sector scanner was turned off and Fast Error Skip was turned on so as to compare it with the other drives.

The test CDs we tried took a very long time using I.B.S off and fast error skip turned on and we had to abort the test. When we re-tried with I.B.S. on the drive was better:

Safedisk 2 Read Speed

I 19:29:04 Starting copy from PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-105 to C:\DVDWriting\maxpayne.ccd
I 19:29:04 Read Speed for Data Tracks: Maximum
I 19:29:04 Read Speed for Audio Tracks: Maximum
I 19:29:04 Read SubChannel Data from Data Tracks: Yes
I 19:29:04 Read SubChannel Data from Audio Tracks: Yes
I 19:29:04 Fast Error Skip: Yes
I 19:29:04 Don't report read errors: Yes
I 19:29:04 Intelligent Bad Sector Scanner: Yes
I 19:29:05 CD contains CD-Text: No
I 19:29:05 Reading Track 1... (Blocks 0-358329)
I 20:04:24 Fast Error Skip has been disabled automatically!
I 20:24:54 Duration of operation: 00:55:49
I 20:24:54 Average Speed: 251 kBytes/s (1.43)
I 20:24:54 Reading finished!

Philips DVDRW228k: Average Speed: 756 kBytes/s (4.30)

Pioneer A04: Average Speed: 193 kBytes/s (1.10)

Pioneer A05: Average Speed: 251 kBytes/s (1.43)

Safedisk 2 reading performance is slightly better at 1.42 speed but it can't touch the Philips DVDRW228k (we did notice that it now reads full 96 bytes of sub-channel data - BTW: the A04 could only read 16 bytes).

SAFEDISK 2 Writing

We tested if the drive can handle correct EFM encoding with CloneCD by writing Serious Sam 2nd Encounter (which is protected with Safedisk 2.51):

AWS OFF: Copy did NOT work!

AWS ON: Copy did NOT work!

This drive is not very good for protected CDs but does now support DAO RAW 96.

LaserLok

We tested the drive's ability to read laserlok protected CD:

I 18:29:51 Duration of operation: 00:33:22
I 18:29:51 Average Speed: 398 kBytes/s (2.27)

Region Protection

Most new DVD-ROM drives are region protected and will only playback a DVD movie title from a certain region. This is controlled by the use of region codes.

This drive has RPC-II region protection (RPC-2 devices allow you to change the drive's region a certain number of times before they become permanently locked).

Page 4 - Last Updated: 18 October 2002