Sony DRU-840A detail information

Advanced Tests

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-840A supports everything.

We created our “Sheep Test” disc according to “Womble’s” instructions; using the copy method, our results follow.

As you can see all files copied except for the Sheep3 from the written disc in the DRU-840A to our Hard Drive; resulting in the determination that this drive is rated “2 sheep”.

Overburning:

900MB (100 minute) over-burn test

For this test we used an e-blue 100 minute disc.

The Sony DRU-840A had no problems in creating our 100 minute CD-R test burn.

700MB (80 minute) over-burn test

From the above screenshot, the Sony DRU-840A failed to overburn this disc to 83:28.04; we then set CD-Speed to Overburn to 82:00.00.  This burn is shown below:

As you can see the Sony DRU-840A had no problem burning our 80 minute disc to 81 minutes and 21 seconds.  The burn was locked at 16X by the drive.

We then decided to see if the Sony DRU-840A is able to read the same overburned disc.

As we can see fro the above screenshot, the Sony DRU-840A had no problems when reading our test disc.

DVD+R over-burn test

First we attempted to overburn a DVD+R media.

The Sony DRU-840A does not support over-burning this type of media.

DVD-R over-burn test

Then we attempted an over-burn on a DVD-R media.

Here to, the Sony DRU-840A did not support over-burning to the DVD-R media.

MINI DVD discs

For our final test we would like to see how the Sony DRU-840A works with one of our mini-DVD test discs.

Here we are testing the ability of the DRU-840A to write and read a mini DVD-RW disc with the capacity of 30 minutes/1.36GB.

This Memorex media is made by Verbatim.  Thanks to Memorex USA for providing this media.

The Sony DRU-840A had no problems in writing our test Mini-Disc.  Let’s take a look to see if the drive can also read the disc.

The Sony DRU-840A read our test mini-DVD without any problems.

This concludes our Sony DRU-840A review. To read the conclusion, click on the link below.

DVD-RAM writing performance

Conclusion