detail information

To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the NEC ND-3540A. 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 NEC ND-3540A supports everything.

The NEC ND-3540A 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-HD166S. Below are our results from the 'Sheep Tests":

As we can read from the table the NEC ND-3540A is a 'Two Sheep Burner", but it failed to write the Safedisc V2.90 and Sheep3 tests.

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:

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

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

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

Results:

The NEC ND-3540A had no problems detecting and ripping the copy protected audio CD's.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the NEC ND-3540A, 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 NEC ND-3540A reported an overburn capacity of 92 Minutes and 48 Seconds, so we created a test disc slightly smaller then the max reported overburn capacity (91m:59s). See below:

The pictures above show us that the NEC ND-3540A did not have any problems writing or reading the approximately 92 minutes long CDs. The reading curve is excellent.

We also tried to read-back a 99 minute CD-R (created with another drive) but the NEC ND-3540A failed to recognize the disc length. See below:

Mini DVD-R/RW discs:

In this section we are going to test if the NEC ND-3540A is capable to write and read mini DVD-R/RW discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.46 GB. But let us take a look at the media first:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD-R : RITEKG04]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disc & BookType :       [DVD-R] - [DVD-R]
Manufacturer Name :      [Ritek Corp.]
Manufacturer ID :        [RITEKG04]
Blank Disc Capacity :    [714,544 Sectors = 1.46 GB (1.36 GB)]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
** INFO : Hex Dump Of 'Media Code'-Block Listed Below
** INFO : 4-Byte Header Preceding 'Media Code'-Block Discarded
** INFO : Format 0Eh - Pre-Recorded Information In Lead-In
0000 : 01 40 e1 ff 21 8d 52 00  02 96 0e 14 88 9a 80 00   .@..!.R.........
0010 : 03 52 49 54 45 4b 47 00  04 30 34 00 00 30 31 00   .RITEKG..04..01.
0020 : 05 88 80 00 00 00 02 00  06 08 12 11 86 67 80 00   .............g..
0030 : 07 88 80 00 00 00 00 00  08 06 19 0a 0b 09 01 00   ................
0040 : 09 99 05 0c 0b 80 00 00  0a 00 00 00 00 00 10 00   ................
0050 : 0b 04 1d 18 a8 88 85 00  0c 89 ac 88 80 00 00 00   ................
0060 : 0d 00 00 d0 00 00 00 00                            ........       
** INFO : Hex Dump Of 'Control Data Zone'-Block Listed Below
** INFO : 4-Byte Header Preceding 'CDZ'-Block Discarded
** INFO : Format 10h - Physical Format Information Of Control Data Zone
0000 : 25 1f 02 00 00 03 00 00  00 0d e7 2f 00 00 00 00   %........../....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ DVD Identifier - http://DVD.Identifier.CDfreaks.com ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The media is made by Ritek (Made in Taiwan).  Thanks to Conrexx Technology B.V. (The Netherlands) for sending us this media.

The Nec ND-3540 had no problems to write or read the Traxdata Mini DVD-R disc. Let us try a Mini DVD-RW disc:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unique Disc Identifier : [DVD-RW : RITEKW01]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disc & BookType :       [DVD-RW] - [DVD-RW]
Manufacturer Name :      [Ritek Corp.]
Manufacturer ID :        [RITEKW01]
Blank Disc Capacity :    [714,544 Sectors = 1.46 GB (1.36 GB)]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
** INFO : Hex Dump Of 'Media Code'-Block Listed Below
** INFO : 4-Byte Header Preceding 'Media Code'-Block Discarded
** INFO : Format 0Eh - Pre-Recorded Information In Lead-In
0000 : 01 40 f6 ff 21 8d 21 00  02 0d 06 07 88 65 0d 00   .@..!.!......e..
0010 : 03 52 49 54 45 4b 57 00  04 30 31 00 00 00 00 00   .RITEKW..01.....
0020 : 05 00 88 00 00 00 00 00  06 11 09 05 60 07 10 00   ............`...
0030 : 07 00 00 00 88 00 00 00                            ........       
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ DVD Identifier - http://DVD.Identifier.CDfreaks.com ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The media is made by Ritek (Made in Taiwan).  Thanks to Conrexx Technology B.V. (The Netherlands) for sending us this media.

Again, the NEC ND-3540 had no problems to write or read the Traxdata Mini DVD-RW disc.

Video-CD disc:

We were curious how the NEC ND-3540A would handle and 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 it back. Below the result:

As we can see the NEC ND-3540A is locked around 22x reading Video-CD's.

Now, that concludes our NEC ND-3540A review, head on to the last page to read our conclusion…