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'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.

As we can see from the screenshot below; the Lite-On SOHR-5238S supports all the required read and write formats.

As we can see from the above screenshot; the Lite-On SOHR-5238S burned the sheep 1, sheep 2 and the SafeDisc 2.90 tests without problems.

From the screenshot above; we can see the Lite-On SOHR-5238S burned the sheeptest 3 file. Unfortunately the SOHR-5238S could not copy the file back to our test PC, nor could any other drive we had available.

As we can see the Lite-ON SOHR-5238S supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and subchannel data.

Below are our results from the 'Sheep Tests":

From our Sheep test results we can see the Lite-On SOHR-5238S is a 'Two Sheep Burner", it also successfully completed the SafeDisc V2.90 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:

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

And finally Celine Dion: A New Day Has Come, which is protected with Key2audio version 3

The Lite-On SOHR-5238S performed well with the protected Audio discs.

OverBurning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the Lite-On SOHR-5238S, we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn disc larger then 99/100 minutes.

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

The Lite-On SOHR-5238S reported an overburn capacity of 99 Minutes and 52 Seconds, so we created a test disc slightly smaller then the max reported overburn capacity (99m:45s).

See the screenshot below.

As we can see above, the Lite-On SOHR-5238S had no problems in creating the disc.

We read the disc back in CD-Speed at full speed. As we can see above, the Lite-On SOHR-5238S had no problems in reading the disc to the end, with an impressive maximum read speed of 57.73x.

We then read the disc back in another reader, this time using the Plextor DVDR PX-716A at maximum speed, in this case 48x. Again the read drive had no problems in reading the overburned disc.

One can only conclude this drive will be useful for overburning certain media.

Video-CD Disc:

For the final test we wanted to find out how the Lite-On SOHR-5238S would read a Video CD disc. We created a short VCD of around 44 minutes in length from an available MPEG1 clip.

As we can see below, the drive had no problem in reading this disc, although from the graph we can see the read speed is locked at 32x.

This concludes our Lite-On SOHR-5238S review

Lets head on to the last page to read our conclusion….