Advanced Tests

To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Lite-On SOHR-5239V. These tests are: “Sheep Test”, overburning and we have formatted a disc in CD-MRW (Mt. Rainier) format.

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 SOHR-5239V supports everything.

The Lite-On SOHR5239V 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 SOHR-5239V is a ‘Two Sheep Burner’. It also succeeded in writing the Safedisc V2.90 test but failed the Sheep3 test.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the Lite-On SOHR-5239V, we used the over-burning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed.

Nero CD/DVD Speed reports that the disc can be overburned to 93 minutes and 7 seconds.

To test if the Lite-On SOHR-5239V is capable to read overburned CD-Rs, we have set up a compilation in Nero and burned the disc, which has been tested above, to it’s maximum capacity and tried to read back the disc:

We read the disc back in CD-Speed at full speed. As we can see above, the Lite-On SOHR-5239V had no problems in reading the disc to the end, with an maximum read speed of 54.33x.

Mount Rainier:

According to the specifications, the drive also supports the Mount Rainier packet writing format. Here a short explanation of Mt. Rainier, copied to here from wikipedia:

Mount Rainier is a format for re-writable optical discs which provides for packet writing and defect management. Its goal is the replacement of the floppy disk. It is named after Mount Rainier, a mountain near Seattle, Washington, USA.

Mount Rainier (MRW) can be used only with drives that explicitly support it. Unlike DVD-RAM, it does not require unusual media, i.e. it works with standard CD-RW and DVD+RW media.

The physical format of MRW disks is an extension of the UDF format, but this is transparently managed internally by drive intelligence which remaps physical drive blocks into a virtual and defect-free space. Therefore the host computer does not see the physical format of the disk, giving it filesystem independence.

The time needed for the formatting of the disk is shortened to about one minute by the background formatting capabilities of the drive. Formatting allocates some sectors at the end of the disk for defect management. Defective sectors are recorded at a table in the lead-in (an administrative area) and in a copy of the table in the lead-out.

Since this format is considered to be almost dead. So we haven’t made very detailed tests for this format and only formatted one Verbatim Ultraspeed 32x CD-RW in MRW format using Nero InCD version 5.5.0.11.

As you can see above, the drive had no problems to format the disc in Mount Rainier format.

CD-RW Writing Performance

Conclusion