detail information

Since we're looking at a sample drive we didn't receive any software with it. We're thus going to skip the package part of our review and dive right into the hardware. Let's start with a screenshot of the detected drive specifications using the Nero InfoTool software:

Nero InfoTool reveals us that the Sanyo drive has firmware version 2.07 installed and has a 4MB buffer on board. The drive can write CD-R's at 24x and read CD media at 40x maximum. According to InfoTool the drive can write to both DVD-formats (plus and minus) and it can read all DVD media, except DVD-RAM. When checking out the drive's specifications with Nero Burning ROM we can see the following information:

Nero Burning ROM confirms the information we got from the InfoTool software. We can see that the drive uses the BURN-Proof technique to prevent buffer underruns and we can also see that the Sanyo CRD-BPDV2 drive supports the HD-BURN disc type. Since this is a new technique we're going to discuss it on a separate page.

The Drive:

On the front of the Sanyo CRD-BPDV2 drive we can find a big gold coloured HD-BURN logo on its tray. Underneath that we can find a High Speed CD-ReWriteable logo, a headphone jack, volume control dial, busy/write LEDs, a BPRec (Burn-Proof Recording) logo and last but not least, an eject button.

On the back of the Sanyo drive we can find the usual set of jumpers (Master, Slave or CableSelect), an IDE connection and a power connection. Besides that we can also find another set of jumpers which are used for factory use only and an UDMA jumper, which is enabled by default.

Drive Features:

Buffer Underrun Protection:

As we already mentioned, the Sanyo drive supports the BURN-Proof (Buffer UnderRuN-Proof) technique. When the, in this case 4MB, buffer of the recorder falls beneath a certain level, it will stop recording as of a specific location on the CD. The recorder then continues attempting to receive data from the PC to refill the buffer. As soon as the buffer has been refilled, the recorder will start recording again.

HD-BURN:

In short Sanyo's HD-BURN technique allows you to double the capacity of a standard CD-Recordable disc. This would mean that you can fit 1.4GB of data on a standard 700MB disc. We'll go into detail on HD-BURN on the next page.

Write Methods:

Let's take a look at the Sanyo's CD-R write and CD-RW re-write performance, using the Nero CD Speed software.

CD-Recordable Media:

CD-ReWriteable Media:

As you can see from the produced graphs the Sanyo drive uses the Z-CLV (Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) recording method for CD-R discs. Z-CLV means that the disc is divided into different recording zones and after each zone the write speed is increased. As you can see from the first graph, the Sanyo drive has three recording zones; 16x, 20x and 24x. There isn't much to say about the drive's re-write performance. The drive starts writing at 10x and stays at this speed throughout the entire disc.

Introduction

HD-BURN