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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Pioneer DVR-110. 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 Pioneer DVR-110 supports everything.

The Pioneer DVR-110 supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the Pioneer DVR-110 is a 'Two Sheep Burner",

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: 

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

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

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

Results:

From our 'copy protected audio disc" tests, we would have to conclude the Pioneer DVR-110 had no problems in ripping our protected audio CD's.

DVD-RAM:

The Pioneer DVR-110 is a so-called Super Multi drive, meaning is also supports the DVD-RAM format.

This drive is one of few drives that also support the DVD-RAM format, lets us look at the recording side of the disc, and as you can see it has differences from the other DVD+R/W/R9 DL and DVD-R/W discs.

We can see a very fascinating pattern of darker spots, supposedly these spots are used for calibration while writing and reading.

A DVD-RAM's disc can be formatted in the following formats:

• FAT32
• UDF 1.02
• UDF 1.50
• UDF 2.00
• UDF 2.01
• UDF 2.50

By formatting a DVD-RAM disc with FAT32 it will act like a removable hard drive and all writing will be done as 'background processes". Meaning you do not have to wait for it to finish, you can start or work with other applications while the DVD-RAM is working without noticing any 'hangs" or CPU slowdowns.

With some 3^rd party drivers it's possible to unleash some of the powers of the DVD-RAM media format.

These drivers also come with a DVD-RAM formatting utility which allows the disc to be formatted in a number of formats. See the list below.

• FAT32
• UDF 1.50
• UDF 2.00

In the above screenshot we have a DVD-RAM disc in our drive and formatted as FAT32. This will allow simple dragging and dropping of files. In fact we have a backup of this review stored on the DVD-RAM disc.

Lets us take a look at the media we are going to use in these tests:

Maxell branded 5x media manufactured by Maxell

Emgeton 3x media manufactured by Optodisc

As we can see, the Maxell media is rated at 5x and the Emgeton media is rated at 3x.

Now let's see how DVD-RAM media is written and read by the Pioneer DVR-110 drive.

Maxell 5x without verification

Maxell 5x with verification

Emgeton 2x write without verification

For those of you who are not familiar with DVD-RAM, you may probably think that something went wrong during the write process with the verification turned on, since the 5x media was written at 2x. But not to worry, that is pretty normal for DVD-RAM discs, the reason for the 'low" speed is, the drive constantly reads back the data after writing it to verify that it's written correctly. We can also call it a 'bullet proof" writing/verify technique, with no data loss/errors.

Another advantage with DVD-RAM is that the discs can be formatted/erased/written at over 100.000 times before it will/can cause/report any errors. Let's try to read back the 2 discs that we wrote:

Maxell DVD-RAM 5x

Emgeton DVD-RAM 2x

As we can see, the Pioneer DVR-110 read the Maxell media at 5x and the Emgeton media at 2x. This means the media is also read at its rated speed with the Pioneer DVR-110.

At the present time we have no other method of testing DVD-RAM media, this should not cause too much concern as the media is verified as its being written.

Overburning:

700MB (80 minute) over-burn test:

To test the over-burning capabilities of the Pioneer DVR-110, we used the over-burning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can over-burn disc larger than 80 minutes.

We used a Verbatim Crystal DL 700 MB media to test if the Pioneer DVR-110 could over-burn.

The Pioneer DVR-110 reported an over-burn capacity of 81:47.03. So we set Nero CD-DVD Speed to make a test disc with a capacity slightly less than the reported maximum, 81:40.74 to be exact. The write completed successfully.

We then attempted to read the disc with the Pioneer DVR-110. See the screenshot below.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Pioneer DVR-110 successfully read the disc.

900MB (99 minute) over-burn test:

For this test we used an Infiniti Professional Compax 99min/900mb CD-R. (Thanks to Medea International (UK) for providing the disc).

From past experience with the 110 series drives, we expected the above error. We then tried to create a disc with a capacity of 89:45.74 to test if the drive could handle discs of up to 90 minutes.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Pioneer DVR-110 created our test disc. Now it was time to see if the drive could read the disc.

As we can see from the above screenshot, the Pioneer DVR-110 successfully read the disc.

We can conclude that the Pioneer DVR-110 is able to over-burn 80 minute CD-R and burn up to a maximum of 89 minutes 45 seconds on 90 minute media, but the Pioneer DVR-110 is not suitable for writing 900MB (99 minute) media larger than 89 minutes 45 seconds.

Mini DVD-RW discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Pioneer DVR-110 is capable of writing and reading mini DVD-RW discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.46 GB. But let us take a look at the media first:

The Memorex media is made by CMC Magnetics.  Thanks to Memorex Europe for sending us this media.

As we can see, the Pioneer DVR-110 had no problems in writing to our MINI DVD-RW disc.

Now it was time to test if the Pioneer DVR-110 could read our disc.

The Pioneer DVR-110 had no problems in reading the created MINI DVD-RW disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Pioneer DVR-110 would 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 the disc back. Below is our result:

The Pioneer DVR-110 is not locked and will read VCD at the drives rated speed of 40x.

This concludes our Pioneer DVR-110 review, lets head on to the last page to read our conclusion…