Writing performance DVD-RAM:

The SN-S082M supports writing and reading the DVD-RAM format. Let 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. These tick marks are "address information" ("Pre-mastered Pit Header Field") which are embedded onto the disc. This is header information in front of data sector area, and is the same format as HDD and MO.

A DVD-RAM 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”. This means that 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.

DVD-RAM has error correction, but also has error replacement spare sectors as a "defect management" function. This gives higher reliability than other DVD formats.

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 us take a look at the media we are going to use in these tests:

Verbatim 5x DVD-RAM media, manufactured by Matsushita Electric

Traxdata 3x DVD-RAM media, manufactured by RiTEK.

Now let’s find out how the Samsung SN-S082M performed when writing DVD-RAM media:

Verbatim 5x DVD-RAM media, manufactured by Matsushita Electric.

Verbatim 5x at 5x with “Streaming” option

The SN-S082M wrote our 5x DVD-RAM media in 12 minutes and 10 seconds.

Traxdata 3x DVD-RAM media, manufactured by RiTEK.

The SN-S082M wrote our 3x DVD-RAM media in 18 minutes and 22 seconds.

Now let’s see how our SN-S082M performs when reading back the discs that we wrote:

As we can see, the SN-S082M uses a P-CAV reading method, and reads the disc at its rated write speed, meaning the 5x media at 5x and the 3x media at 3x.

Summary:

The SN-S082M performed excellent at both reading and writing our test DVD-RAM media. When using 5x media the drive completed a full disc in 12 minutes and 10 seconds, which should be fast enough for everyday backups.

On the next page we will run some LightScribe tests on the SN-S082M …

DVD+R DL/-R DL Writing performance

LightScribe Performance