detail information

The 'Sheep test":

For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called Sheep Test? That is because the symbol of the first 1 to 1 copy program called CloneCD is a sheep. When looking at supported writers, you will notice that the feature list has sheep to indicate if a feature is supported or not. In this case we are interested in the writer's ability to backup/write weak sectors. Also called: 'Correct EFM encoding of regular bit-patterns".

⋅         No sheep: Can't backup any Safedisc 2 versions without the help of software tricks ⋅         1 Sheep: Can backup Safedisc 2 up to version 2.4x without software tricks
⋅         2 Sheep: Can backup Safedisc 2, including version 2.5x
⋅         3 Sheep: Can write all possible weak sectors, few if any writers could do this.

One of our forum moderators, Womble, has written a guide concerning the 'Sheep Test" that could be found here.

In the screenshot below we see that the BenQ DW1640 supports all available write and read features in CloneCD:

The BenQ DW1640 supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode. This means that it can write uncorrected data and subchannel data.

Below are our results from the 'Sheep Tests":

The BenQ DW1640 qualifies as a two sheep writer and is thus an average writer for backing up protected games.

Copy protected Audio:

For our protected audio test we used the Exact Audio Copy program. We inserted the protected audio discs and if the drive was able to recognize the disc we tried to extract the music tracks to the hard drive. First let us look at the discs we had available for this test:

Westlife: World of our own is protected with Cactus data shield 100.

Natalie Imbruglias White Lilies Island. This disc is protected with Cactus Datashield 200

Shakira: Laundry Service, which is protected with Key2Audio version 2.

And finally Celine Dion: A New Day Has Come, which is protected with Key2Audio version 3

Results:

The BenQ DW1640 did well and reads all the protected audio discs without any problems.

Overburning:

To test the CD overburning capabilities of the BenQ DW1640 we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn to more than 99 minutes.

Media used is Ritek 99-minute media. And we also tried to write a disc in Nero, but it locked up the whole computer while writing the lead-out. We then tried the create data disc option in CD-Speed with overburn enabled:

There are no problems with CD-Speed and it wrote the disc all the way up to almost 100 minutes! Looks like the problem might be with Nero then.

There are no problems with reading the 99-minute disc.

Now, this would normally be the end of the review, but instead head over to read about SolidBurn and OverSpeeding!...