detail information

To round off this review we will run some advanced tests on the Lite-On SOHW-1673S.

The 'Sheep test":

For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called Sheep Test? That is because the symbol 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 could be found here.

In the screenshot below we see that the Lite-On SOHW-1673S supports all available write and read features in CloneCD:

The Lite-On SOHW-1673S supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode. This means that it can write uncorrected data and subchannel data.

Below are our results from the 'Sheep Tests":

The Lite-On SOHW-1673S qualifies as a two sheep writer and can also produce functional backups of Safedisc 2.90 protected discs. This makes the Lite-On SOHW-1673S one of the better choices for protected game discs.

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.

Natalie Imbruglias White Lilies Island. This disc is protected with Cactus Datashield 200

Shakira: Laundry Service, which is protected with Key2Audio version 2.

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

Results:

The Lite-On SOHW-1673S did not have any problems with reading the protected audio discs.

Overburning:

To test the CD overburning capabilities of the Lite-On SOHW-1673S we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn to more than 99 minutes:

Media used is Ritek 99-minute media. And we also wrote a 99-minute disc in Nero:

Unfortunately, the drive could not write to more than 95 minutes, but what about reading 99 minute discs?

There are no problems reading the 99-minute test disc.

Now, that concludes our Lite-On SOHW-1673S review, head on to the last page to read our conclusion…