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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the LG GSA-4166B. These tests are: 'Sheep Test" and some special disc tests.

The 'Sheep Test":

 For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called sheep test? That's because the logo 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 can be found here.

In the screenshot below taken from CloneCD, we see the LG GSA-4166B supports everything.

The LG GSA-4166B supports DAO-RAW recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the LG GSA-4166B is a 'Two Sheep Burner'. It also succeeded in writing the Safedisc V2.90 test but failed the Sheep3 test.

DVD-RAM:

The LG GSA-4166B is a Super Multi drive, meaning is also supports the DVD-RAM format.

Let's look at the recording side of the disc, and as you can see it has differences from the other DVD+R/W/R9 DL and DVD-R/W discs.

You can see a very fascinating pattern of darker spots, supposedly these spots are used for calibration while writing and reading.

A DVD-RAM's disc can be formatted in the following formats:

• FAT32
• UDF 1.02
• UDF 1.50
• UDF 2.00
• UDF 2.01
• UDF 2.50

By formatting a DVD-RAM disc with FAT32 it will act like a removable hard drive and all writing will be done in the 'background processes". Meaning you do not have to wait for it to finish - you can start or work with other applications while the DVD-RAM is working without noticing any 'hangs" or CPU slowdowns.

Let's take a look at the media we are going to use in these tests:

Maxell branded DVD-RAM media certified at 2-5x

On to the interesting part, writing and reading DVD-RAM media.

Maxell DVD-RAM 5x without verification

Maxell DVD-RAM 5x with verification

For those who are not familiar with DVD-RAM would probably think that something went wrong during the write process with the verifications turned on -  since the 5x media was written at 1.96x. But not to worry - that is pretty normal for DVD-RAM discs, the reason for the 'low" speed is - the drive constantly reads back the data after writing it to verify that it's written correctly. We can also call it a 'bullet proof" writing/verify technique - with no data loss/errors.

Another advantage with DVD-RAM is that the discs can be formatted/erased/written over 100,000 times before it will/can cause/report any errors. Let's try to read back the disc that we wrote.

Maxell DVD-RAM 5x

As we see from the picture above, the 5x media was read back at 5x using the P-CAV technique.

Since we have no equipment at the present time to perform any quality measuring tests with the DVD-RAM format it will be skipped, but let it be noted, it should not be necessary since the RAM writer verifies the written data by default itself.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the LG GSA-4166B, we used the over-burning test in Nero CD-DVD Speed.

The LG GSA-4166B reports an over-burning capacity of 83:10:38 a plus factor of 3:10:43.

To test if the LG GSA-4166B is actually capable of overburning, we attempted to write a CD-R to the reported overburn capacity.

We can see the LG GSA-4166B failed to achieve the overburn. We tried with several different media but the drive failed each time.

Now that we have examined some of the advanced features, let's take a look at another one. The LightScribe feature/Technique…..