detail information

DVD-RAM:

The Plextor PX-750A is a so-called Multi drive, meaning it also supports the DVD-RAM format.

This drive is one of few drives that also supports 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.

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 Plextor PX-750A drive.

Maxell 5x without verification

Maxell 5x with verification

Emgeton 3x 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

Emgeton DVD-RAM

As we can see, the Plextor PX-750A also reads DVD-RAM at 5x and had no problems in reading our two test discs.

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.

The 'Sheep Test":

To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Plextor PX-750A. These tests are: 'Sheep Test", protected audio discs and some special disc tests.

 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 Plextor PX-750A supports most features but not all.

The Plextor PX-750A 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 Plextor PX-750A is a 'Two Sheep Burner", although it was not able to complete our Safedisc 2.90 test.

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 Plextor PX-750A had no problems in ripping our protected audio CD's.

Overburning:

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 the screenshot above, it was clear the Plextor PX-750A should be able to write the 99 minute media at its full length. We then set up a test over-burn with Nero CD-Speed. We set the test at 99:52.74 to be exact, and then attempted to write a test disc.

The Plextor PX-750A successfully created our test disc. We then tested to see if the Plextor PX-750A could read our created disc. As you can see from the screenshot below, the PX-750A could not recognise our created disc.

We then tried to read our created disc in the Lite-On SOHR-5238S CD-RW drive. As we can see from the screenshot below the Lite-On CD-RW drive had no problems in reading the created disc.

We can conclude that the Plextor PX-750A can overburn CD-R media at up to 99 minutes and 52 seconds but had problems in recognising 99 minute media.

Mini DVD-RW discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Plextor PX-750A is capable of writing and reading mini DVD-R/RW discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.46 GB.

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

As we can see, the Plextor PX-750A had no problems in writing to our MINI DVD-RW disc.

Now it was time to test if the Plextor PX-750A could read our disc.

The Plextor PX-750A had no problems in reading the created MINI DVD-RW disc.

The Verbatim MINI DVD-R was manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation. Thanks to SVP UK for providing this media.

Now it was time to see if the Plextor PX-750A could write our MINI DVD-R disc.

The Plextor PX-750A had no problems writing our MINI DVD-R disc. Now let's see if the drive can read back the disc.

The Plextor PX-750A successfully read back our MINI DVD-R disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Plextor PX-750A 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 Plextor PX-750A is not locked and read our test VCD at full speed without problems.

This concludes our Plextor PX-750A review, let's head on to the last page to read our conclusion…