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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S. 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 Lite-On SHM-165H6S supports everything.

The Lite-On SHM-165H6S 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 Lite-On SHM-165H6S is a 'Two Sheep Burner'. It also succeeded in writing the Safedisc V2.90 test but failed the Sheep3 test.

DVD-RAM:

The Lite-On SHM-165H6S is a Super AllWrite 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. These tick marks are "address information" ("Pre-mastered Pit Header Field") which are embedded onto the disc. This is header information in front of data sector area, and is the same format as HDD and MO.

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.

We will now run a disc quality scan on our burned media using the Lite-On SHM-165H6S and CD-Speed version 4.50. We should mention that this should not be necessary under normal use of DVD-RAM media, as the drive will automatically check the disc for errors as it writes. The test results are inconclusive and we make no claims to the veracity or accuracy of the test. It is included for illustration purposes only.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the LITE-ON SHM-165H6S, we used the over-burning test in Nero CD-DVD Speed.

The Lite-On SHM-165H6S reports an over-burning capacity of 83:14:21 a plus factor of 3:14:25.

To test if the Lite-On SHM-165H6S is actually capable of overburning, we attempted to write an 80 minute CD-R to the reported overburn capacity.

The  Lite-On SHM-165H6S was successful in creating and reading the overburned CD-R.

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