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To round off this review we will run some advanced tests on the Pioneer DVR-109.

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 Pioneer DVR-109 supports all available write and read features in CloneCD:

The Pioneer DVR-109 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 Pioneer DVR-109 qualifies as a two sheep writer and is thus an average writer for backing up protected games.

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:

Unfortunately two of the audio discs were unreadable with the Pioneer DVR-109, which makes this drive some of worse drives for backing up protected audio discs.

Overburning:

To test the CD overburning capabilities of the Pioneer DVR-109 we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn to 94 minutes.

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

Unfortunately the drive failed to write, we tried 10 discs all the way down to 83 minutes, but it ALWAYS failed at 98 or 99% with a 'positioning error" message regardless of how much data we had on the disc. We also tried different writing speed with no luck. It looks like the pioneer DVR-109 can't overburn CD-R media at all.

It failed reading the 99 minute disc, but it looks like it could read to about 95 minutes at least.

Now, that concludes our Pioneer DVR-109 review, head on to the last page to read our conclusion…