detail information

For our final (advanced) tests we're going to test how the Plextor drive performs with data and audio copy-protections. Besides that we'll also check if the drive can overburn and if it can handle 8cm discs. Let's start with the data copy-protections:

Copy-Protected Data:

For our copy-protected data tests we, as always, used CloneCD to read and write several popular copy-protections. In the picture below you can see that the Plextor PX-504A is full supported by CloneCD:

The Plextor drive supports the DAO-RAW96 recording mode which basically means that the drive can write uncorrected data and SubChannel Data. In the table below we've summed up all of our results and after the table we will clarify our results:

Protected Data	Game Title	Protection (version)	Read Time	Back-up Works
	Desperados	LaserLock	20m:46s	Yes
	The Sims: House Party	SafeDisc v2.10.030	2m:22s	Partially
	Mafia: The City Of Lost Heaven (CD1)	SafeDisc v2.70.030	2m:49s	Partially
	Neverwinter Nights (CD3)	SecuRom v4.76.00.0051	2m:25s	Yes
	Final Fantasy VIII (CD1)	PlayStation LibCrypt	-m:--s	No

The Plextor PX-504A showed an expected result. It performed very well when reading the LaserLock and SafeDisc protections. As expected the Plextor drive needed weak sector amplification to create a fully working back-up of the SafeDisc 2 protection, even when copying lower versions of this protection.

When it came to SubChannel Data reading the drive was fast, faster than we're used from a Plextor drive since many are limited in read speed when it comes to extracting the SubChannels. It was too bad the Plextor drive failed to read the PlayStation discs. We tried other discs but the drive simply couldn't read them.

Copy-Protected Audio:

For our protected audio disc tests we this time only used the PlexTools software. We simply inserted the audio discs in the Plextor drive and waited if the drive could recognize the disc and if so, could extract the audio tracks. In the table below we've summed up our results:

The Plextor recorder showed an excellent result with the Key2Audio and Cactus Data Shield protection. It had no problems reading the discs and extracting the audio tracks. Although the 'Enable Single Session' option in the PlexTools software was not available for the PX-504A drive, it didn't need it since it could extract all tracks without a problem. It was too bad the Doc.loc disc could not be recognized by the drive at all. We of course also tried other software like CloneCD but this gave us the same result.

Overburning:

We used DataTrack 99min/900MB CD-R's for our tests that were certified up to 40x writing. We used Nero CD Speed to do an overburn test. We set the 'Test capacity' to 99 minutes but at this value the test unfortunately didn't start. When we lowered the test capacity to 89 minutes the test was completed successfully:

From the results we can see that overburning is limited to about 89 minutes. As expected reading of 99 minute media also failed as you can see from the screenshot on the right. The size of the 98 minute audio disc was detected completely wrong. When we used an audio disc of 88 minutes the Plextor drive had no problems reading it.

8cm Discs:

As a final test we tested if the PX-504A drive could read and write 8cm discs. For our write test we used Nero Burning Rom and after that we used Nero CD Speed to do another transfer rate test. Both tests were completed without a problem:

Re-Write Tests

Conclusion