detail information

It happens to all of us sooner or later: a disc is scratched and cannot be read properly anymore... In this test we took a CD-Recordable and (heavily) scratched it with some fine sandpaper. We then did a surface scan with Nero CD Speed and you can see the results below. First off let's start with the ATIP information from the used CD-Recordable:

• ATIP: 97m 15s 11f
  
• Disc Manufacturer: Ritek Co.
  
• Reflective layer: Dye (Long strategy; e.g. Cyanine, Azo etc.)
  
• Media type: CD-Recordable
  
• Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
  
• Nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)

Now for the achieved results. We read the disc with the PleXCombo and then read the same disc with a Yamaha CRW3200E (firmware 1.0d), a TEAC CD-W540E (firmware 1.0B), a Mitsumi CR-480ATE (firmware 1.0E) and a Toshiba SD-M1502 DVD-ROM (firmware 1012) for comparison. We'll let the figures speak for themselves. Please note that damaged sectors can still be read. The important percentage is the one of the unreadable sectors. Of course the less, the better:

PleXCombo PX-320A reading scratched disc

Note that the PleXCombo drive (just like the Yamaha and the Mitsumi) writer doesn't report damaged sectors since the drive does not support this. It can only report if a sector is good (readable) or bad (unreadable).

Yamaha CRW3200E reading scratched disc

TEAC CD-W540E reading scratched disc

Mitsumi CR-480ATE reading scratched disc

Toshiba SD-M1502 reading scratched disc

The PleXCombo drive performs very well (35.42% unreadable sectors) and gets the second place behind the Toshiba DVD-ROM drive (25.60% unreadable sectors). The PX-320A can read about 5% more than the other recorders we've reviewed (the Mitsumi CR-480ATE with 40.13% unreadable sectors and the TEAC CD-W540E with 40.54% unreadable sectors). The last place goes to the Yamaha CRW3200E with 51.41% unreadable sectors.

That concludes the reading part of our review. Now it's time to see how the PleXCombo PX-320A performs when writing discs...