To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the LG GSA-H42N.

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-H42N supports all features CloneCD tests for.

The LG GSA-H42N is a “Three Sheep Burner” that can successfully write Safedisc up to V2.51.

CD-R Overburning test:

To test the CD-R overburning capabilities of LG GSA-H42N, we used the overburning test in Nero CD-DVD Speed. According to Nero CD-DVD Speed the drive can overburn disc larger then 80 minutes. For this test we used Ritek Ridata 80min CD-R which is rated 52x speed.

The LG GSA-H42N reported a maximum overburn capacity of 82:38.55 minutes in simulation mode, so we attempted to create a test disc using Nero CD-DVD Speed with a slightly less capacity. See below:

There was no problem writing this media around 82 minutes. We now ran a quality scan to check the created discs readability.

The scan shows a good result with C1 average of 0.69. We conclude that the LG GSA-H42N supports overburning CD-R.

Editor’s note: We burned this test disc at 16x because of the current firmware's issue with high speed CD-R writing.

DVD+R Overburning test:

To test the DVD+R overburning capabilities of the LG GSA-H42N, we used the overburning test in Nero CD-DVD Speed with Taiyo Yuden DVD+R 8x certified media.

From Nero CD-DVD Speed Overburning Test screenshots above, the drive does not support overburning. The test stopped at 4482MB which is the standard size for DVD+R media. We will now attempt to verify this using Nero CD-DVD Speed Create Data Disc:

As you can see that the drive failed to overburn the media. We conclude that the LG GSA-H42N does not support overburning DVD+R.

Mini DVD-R write quality

The media burns with excellent results and the Transfer Rate has a smooth curve.

Mini DVD-RW write quality

The media burns with poor results but the Transfer Rate has a smooth curve.

DVD-RAM Performance

Conclusion