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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Sony DRU-820A.

DVD-RAM:

The Sony DRU-820A is a so-called Multi DVD Burner, meaning is also supports writing and reading 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.

On the data side, we can see a very fascinating pattern of lighter 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, and 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 how the drive performs:

Maxell branded 5x media manufactured by Maxell.
Thanks to Maxell USA for providing this media.

Writing Maxell 5x without verification

Writing Maxell 5x with verification

Transfer Rate test

As we can see, the Sony DRU-820A writes 5x DVD-RAM without any problem, read back the disc at 5x speed nicely and ScanDisc shows excellent quality.

Panasonic branded 3x media manufactured by Matsushita.
Thanks to Sony USA for providing this media.

Writing Panasonic 3x without verification

Writing Panasonic 3x with verification

Transfer Rate test

No problem with writing 3x DVD-RAM. The drive read back the disc at 5x speed and ScanDisc shows excellent quality.

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 3x and 5x media was written at 1.3x and 2x, respectively. But don't worry, that is pretty normal for DVD-RAM discs. The reason for the lower writing 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.

The 'Sheep Test":

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 Sony DRU-820A supports everything.

The Sony DRU-820A does not supports RAW-DAO recording mode, which basically means, it can not write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the Sony DRU-820A is a 'Two Sheep Burner", but it however failed to write the Safedisc V2.90 and Sheep3 tests.

CD-R Overburning test:

To test the CD-R overburning capabilities of Sony DRU-820A, we used the overburning test in Nero CD-DVD Speed. According to Nero CD-DVD Speed the drive can overburn disc larger then 99/100 minutes. For this test we used unbranded Infodisc 99min/900mb CD-R which is rated 10x speed.

The Sony DRU-820A reported an overburn capacity of 99 Minutes and 56 Seconds, so we attempted to created a test disc slightly smaller then the max reported overburn capacity. See below:

There are no problem writing this media around 99 minutes. We now ran a quality scan to check the created discs readability.

The scan shows a very good result. We conclude that the Sony DRU-820A supports overburning 99 minutes CD-R.

DVD+R Overburning test:

To test the DVD+R overburning capabilities of the Sony DRU-820A, we used the overburning test in Nero CD-DVD Speed with Verbatim DVD+R 16x certified media (Thanks to Verbatim for sending the media).

From Nero CD-DVD Speed Overburning Test screenshots above, the drive does not support overburning. The test stopped at 4482MB which is the standard size for DVD+R media. We will now attempt to verify this using Nero CD-DVD Speed Create Data Disc:

As you can see that the drive failed to overburn the media. We conclude that the Sony DRU-820A does not support overburning 4600MB DVD+R.

Mini DVD-R:

The drive burned this Mini DVD-R media very well.

Mini DVD+RW:

The drive burned DVD+RW media nicely with no transfer rate problem.

This concludes our Sony DRU-820A review, lets head on to the last page to read our conclusion…