detail information

To round off this review we will run some advanced tests on the MSI DR8-A2.

The 'Sheep test":

For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called sheep test? That is since the symbol of the first 1 to 1 copy program called CloneCD is a sheep. And 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 writers 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 taken from CloneCD v5, we could see that the MSI DR8-A2 supports every feature in CloneCD:

MSI DR8-A2 supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and subchannel data.

Drive used to verify that the tests works are JLMS XJ-HD165H. Below are our results from the 'Sheep Tests":

We got this error message with every file, meaning that the MSI DR8-A2 do not even qualify as a one sheep writer. So if you are looking for the ultimate drive for backing up copy protected games '? this is not the one to get.

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, that is protected with key2audio version 3

Results:

We had to use secure mode with all discs '?or else we got a lot of timing errors, this makes the MSI DR8-A2 one of the less good choices for backing up protected audio discs.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the MSI DR8-A2 we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can only overburn to a bit over 93 minutes:

To make sure that it actually works we wrote a 93 minutes long disc in Nero Burning ROM:

No problems here '? it wrote fine all the way up to 93 minutes. Let us try to read a previously created 99 minutes disc:

Strange, it detected the disc as a 93:57 minute long disc only. But it did read the first 93:57 minutes of the disc without problems though. It is still disappointing to see that it did not even detect it as 99 minutes.

8CM CD-R and pocket card CD-R discs:

Now we will try to read and write 8cm CD-R discs and pocket card CD-R discs from Memorex.

8cm CD-R disc:

The MSI DR8-A2 did not have any problems with writing and reading the 8cm CD-R disc.

Pocket card CD-R:

The MSI DR8-A2 did not have any problems reading/writing the credit card disc either.

Now, that concludes our MSI DR8-A2 review, head on to the last page to read our conclusion…

DVD-R Quality and DVDRW performance

Conclusion - Summary.