CLONECD

Using the latest version of CLONE CD, I checked the capabilities of the drive:

Above you can see it supports RAW SAO but no RAW-DAO modes. This is drive is not a good choice for backing up protected CDs, furthermore the drive takes a very long time reading Safedisk CDs. (SAFEDISK 2 is currently the only protection system that's effective in preventing copied CDs from being cloned successfully. It uses a defect in the chipsets of most CD writers.)

For the Safedisk 2 test we used the game Max Payne. The read times are:

I 16:21:51 CD contains CD-Text: No
I 16:21:54 Reading Track 1... (Blocks 0-358329)
W 16:21:54 Device PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-103 doesn't support reading of 96 bytes subchannel data (CD+G)!
W 16:22:02 If you don't expect read errors on this CD, disable "Fast Error Skip"!
W 16:22:02 Failed to read Sector 807

... <SNIP> ...

I 18:13:24 Duration of operation: 01:51:33
I 18:13:24 Reading finished!

Yup you read that correctly "01:51:33" to read a Safedisk 2 CD -- protected CDs are not really the A03s strong point.

The drive does not support RAW writing and the writing operation is rejected by CLONECD and the DVD Writer.

RW CDs

The drive supports RW CDRs but not at High Speed 4-10. We tried to erase a written CD-RW at 4-speed using Instant CD/DVD but encountered the following error:

The drive does not recognise the disk as a valid re-writeable disk. This also occured with standard 2 speed re-writeable CDs.

I tested the drives performance at reading CD-RW disks, the performance was quite good, averaging 12.5X as you can see. The drive also has very long disk recognition times!

Sonic MyDVD2.3

The Pioneer includes Sonics authoring program MyDVD. The program works using "themes", allowing you to manage different kinds of media, such as audio, images and video. I didn't like this program, it was cumbersome and had confusing menus. It tries too hard to be very user friendly but ends up being restrictive and slow. If you want to create your own DVDs to share with friends I would recommend you look elsewhere for your authoring needs.

Page 4 - Last Updated: 21 October 2001