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The 'Sheep Test":

To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Plextor PX-755A. 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-755A supports most features but not all.

The Plextor PX-755A 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-755A is a 'No Sheep Burner", and would not be suitable for reading protected discs without using some software tricks.

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-755A is a useful drive for ripping protected Audio CD's

Overburning:

CD-R 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-755A should be able to write the 99 minute media at up to 102 minutes and 10 seconds. We then set up a test over-burn with Nero CD-Speed. We set the test at 102:00.74 to be exact, and then attempted to write a test disc.

The Plextor PX-755A successfully created our test disc. We then tested to see if the Plextor PX-755A could read our created disc. As you can see from the screenshot below, the PX-755A could read the disc up to 92 minutes then failed.

DVD+R over-burn test (4600MB):

For this test we used a Plextor branded Taiyo Yuden 16x DVD+R media. (Thanks to Plextor for providing this media)

The Plextor PX-755A reported the maximum over-burn capacity was 4.38GB. We however attempted to create a data disc with a capacity of 4.6GB using CD-DVD Speed.

The burn failed at 4.38GB, and we have to conclude the Plextor PX-755A can not over-burn DVD+R media.

GigaRec:

One of the nice features of the Plextor Premium series drives, is that they support GigaRec. But what is GigaRec? GigaRec lets you change the recording capacity of a standard CD-R disc from 70 percent up to 130 percent of its standard capacity.

In this test we used PlexTools Professional XL and a Verbatim CD-R media rated at 700MB (80 minutes), and attempted to write 888.47MB of data to the disc with GigaRec enabled.

GigaRec enable/setup screen

First of all we enabled GigaRec and set the (rate) to 1.3x

Our compilation screen

As we can see from the above screenshot, we dragged and dropped 888.37MB of data into the 'Disc Maker" window in PlexTools Professional XL.

Write dialog

We then set the options for our burn; GigaRec only allows 8x maximum writing speed.

Burn completed successfully

As we can see from the above screenshot, our burn completed successfully at 8x. We then tried to read the disc with the Plextor PX-755A.

Read back test

As we can see in the above screenshot, the Plextor PX-755A had no problems in reading back our test disc.

Mini DVD-RW discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Plextor PX-755A 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-755A had no problems in writing to our MINI DVD-RW disc.

Now it was time to test if the Plextor PX-755A could read our disc.

The Plextor PX-755A 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-755A could write our MINI DVD-R disc.

The Plextor PX-755A had no problems writing our MINI DVD-R disc. Now let's see if the drive can read back the disc.

The Plextor PX-755A successfully read back our MINI DVD-R disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Plextor PX-755A 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-755A is locked at 40x when reading VCD discs. The Plextor PX-755A had no problems in reading our test VCD disc.

This concludes our Plextor PX-755A review, let's head on to the last page to read our conclusion…