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

The Pioneer DVR-110D 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-110D is a 'Two Sheep Burner", but it however 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: 

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

Westlife: World of our own, is protected with Cactus data shield 100.

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-110D needs some improving in this area.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the Pioneer DVR-110D, 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 Pioneer DVR-110D reported an overburn capacity of 93 Minutes and 57 Seconds, so we attempted to created a test disc slightly smaller then the max reported overburn capacity (93m:51s). See below:

Unfortunately this returned an error (INVALID FIELD IN PARAMETER LIST). After many attempts with lower values we finally managed to start an overburn test by entering the value to 93:45.

The burn seemed to start well enough, but as the burn reached 89:50 the burn failed, after leaving the test running for a further 5 minutes we concluded the burn had failed and we captured the above screenshot.

We now ran a transfer rate test on two drives to test the created discs readability.

The Pioneer DVR-110D read the disc up to the point where the burn failed, it then returned an error. See screenshot above.

We then tested the disc in our test Lite-on reader. The disc once again was readable up to 89:50

We would have to conclude the Pioneer DVR-110D is not a good drive for overburning CD-R.

Mini DVD-R/RW discs:

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

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

The Pioneer DVR-110D had no problems in writing or reading the Traxdata Mini DVD-R disc. Let us try a Mini DVD-RW disc:

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

Once again, the Pioneer had no problems to writing or reading the Memorex Mini DVD-RW disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Pioneer DVR-110D 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:

As we can see the Pioneer DVR-110D read the disc at 40.27x. It would have reached a faster read speed with a full disc.

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