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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Lite-On SHW-16H5S. These tests are: 'Sheep Test", protected audio discs 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 SHW-16H5S supports everything.

The Lite-On SHW-16H5S supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the Lite-On SHW-16H5S is a 'Two Sheep Burner", in addition it was also able to complete our Safedisc 2.90 test.

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: 

Celine Dion: A New Day Has Come; protected with key2audio version 3.

Herbert Gé¶nemeyer: Mensch - This disc is protected with Cactus Datashield 200.0.4 .3(build 12b)

And Michelle: Leben!; protected with Cactus Datashield 200.5.1.91 - 5.10.090.

Results:

From our 'copy protected audio disc" tests, we would have to conclude the Lite-On SHW-16H5S had no problems in ripping our protected audio CD's.

Overburning:

900MB (99 minute) over-burn test:

For this test we used an Infiniti Professional Compax 99min/900mb CD-R. (Thanks to Medea International (UK) for providing the disc).

From the screenshot above, it was clear the Lite-On SHW-16H5S would be able to write the 99 minute media at its full length. We then set up a test over-burn with Nero CD-Speed. We set the test at 99:57.74 to be exact, then attempted to write a test disc.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Lite-On SHW-16H5S created our test disc. Now it was time to see if the drive could read the disc.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Lite-On SHW-16H5S successfully read the disc.

We can conclude that the Lite-On SHW-16H5S would be a very useful drive for over-burning CD-R media.

Mini DVD-RW discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Lite-On SHW-16H5S is capable of writing and reading mini DVD-R/RW discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.46 GB.

The Memorex media is made by CMC Magnetics.  Thanks to Memorex Europe for sending us this media.

As we can see, the Lite-On SHW-16H5S had no problems in writing to our MINI DVD-RW disc.

Now it was time to test if the Lite-On SHW-16H5S could read our disc.

The Lite-On SHW-16H5S had no problems in reading the created MINI DVD-RW disc.

The Verbatim MINI DVD-R was manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation. Thanks to SVP UK for providing this media.

Now it was time to see if the Lite-On SHW-16H5S could write our MINI DVD-R disc.

The Lite-On SHW-16H5S had no problems writing our MINI DVD-R disc. Now let's see if the drive can read back the disc.

The Lite-On SHW-16H5S successfully read back our MINI DVD-R disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Lite-On SHW-16H5S would read a Video-CD, for this test we created a Video-CD with Nero Burning ROM 6, and used NERO CD-DVD Speed to read the disc back. Below is our result:

The Lite-On SHW-16H5S is locked at 40x when reading VCD's

This concludes our Lite-On SHW-16H5S review, let's head on to the last page to read our conclusion…