detail information

It happens to all of us sooner or later: a disc is scratched and cannot be read properly anymore... In this test we took a CD-Recordable and (heavily) scratched it with some fine sandpaper. We then did a surface scan with Nero CD Speed and you can see the results below. First off let's start with the ATIP information from the used CD-Recordable:

• ATIP: 97m 15s 11f
  
• Disc Manufacturer: Ritek Co.
  
• Reflective layer: Dye (Long strategy; e.g. Cyanine, Azo etc.)
  
• Media type: CD-Recordable
  
• Recording Speeds: min. unknown - max. unknown
  
• Nominal Capacity: 702.83MB (79m 59s 74f / LBA: 359849)

Now for the achieved results. We read the disc with the Yamaha and then read the same disc with a TEAC CD-W540E (firmware 1.0B), a Mitsumi CR-480ATE (firmware 1.0E) and a Toshiba SD-M1502 DVD-ROM (firmware 1012) for comparison. We'll let the figures speak for themselves. Please note that damaged sectors can still be read. The important percentage is the one of the unreadable sectors. Of course the less, the better:

Yamaha CRW3200E reading scratched disc

Note that the Yamaha (and also the Mitsumi) writer doesn't report damaged sectors since the drive does not support this. It can only report if a sector is good (readable) or bad (unreadable).

TEAC CD-W540E reading scratched disc

Mitsumi CR-480ATE reading scratched disc

Toshiba SD-M1502 reading scratched disc

The Yamaha CRW3200E could read the least part of the disc compared to the other readers. The Toshiba DVD-ROM could read the most part of the disc. The Mitsumi and TEAC achieved about the same results (one drive can read some sectors while the other one couldn't and vice versa) but the Mitsumi had just a little less unreadable sectors.

That concludes the reading part. Now it's time to see how the Yamaha CRW3200E performs when writing discs...