CD CAPABILITIES

The drive comes with the excellent package from VOB -- "Instant CD/DVD". It is one of the best mastering programs and is good choice of software IMO.

The CD writing modes of the drive are only 4 speed and 8 speed. The CD writing capabilities seem to be basic with NO RAW modes available.

Although the drive supports BurnProof, it only works in DVD-R / DVD-RW mode. (You can get a buffer underrun when writing to CDRs as its not supported.)

One small quirk of Instant CD/DVD is that when I selected Disc at Once mode, it wouldn't work for some reason but started working upon a reboot. Possibly due to Intel ATA storage drivers (which I later removed).

Another problem that cropped up with VOB Instant CD/DVD was that when a task was completed it would eject the disk (if the option was selected) but would freeze the machine and you would have to manually press the eject button to regain control (didn't do this with NERO).

We tried to write some CDR disks at x8 speed using a selection of different brand CDRs.

The drive was fussy at writing to certain disks, we tried DataSafe, Verbatim, Plasmon Pure Black Unbranded, Pure Violet (Plasmon) Unbranded and TDK disks. It favoured the TDK and Plasmons the most at the full 8x speed. (But then I guess you wouldn't get this burner for writing on to CDRs) .

VOB Instant CD/DVD also has some minor problems with parsing strange characters (like the kind you would encouter in your temporary directory) and directoy depth issues where it would freeze up. Also the DVD-R ISOs were not totally PURE DOS compatible whereas the DVD-Rs created with NERO were (due to long filename issues and ISO compliancy).

I checked the DAE speed with a Pressed Audio CD:

As you can see from above, the speed was 9.5x and the audio quality was perfect.

90/99min Support

The drive supports reading 99mins CDs and managed to sucessfully read a CD 97mins long. When it came to writing to the 99mins (INFINITI and MIRROR MAX) CDs it would not recognise the disks so writing was not supported.

PSX2 & DREAMCAST

I gave it some Playstation and Dreamcast backups to see how it handled them. Some drives have problems with 300 block tracks which are needed to create selfbootable Dreamcast console games. The Pioneer could not backup Dreamcast games as our DiskJuggler failed to recognise the drive. I am told however, that the drive does work in Disc Juggler. The drive did managed to successfully backup Gran Tourismo 3 JAPAN but the copy would not boot on our Playstation 2.

C2 Error Information

Taken from EAC web site:

What is C2? A: On all CD-ROM media are at least two levels of error correction, called C1 and C2. If both fail, the output is probably not correct anymore. Most drives are not able to report if audio reads failed or not, so each block had to be read twice and be compared to make sure that everything is fine. But some newer drives are able to report if C1/C2 failed on specific samples on a read, making it possible to read only once and see if a read error occured. But there is still a problem, as some drives do not report these errors correctly, so you should test it thoroughly before trusting the results.

Unfortunately Exact Audio Copy couldn't detect any features.

Page 3 - Last Updated: 21 October 2001