CD CAPABILITIES P2

90min & 99min CDRs

90min CD-Rs

90 & 99min CD-Rs are manufactured differently and have a finer track definition and a shorter lead out area. This test demands two things: approved media and a drive that's capable of overburning in DAO mode (sometimes you have to write at a slow speed).

Overburning stores data in the leadout area, (the leadout area according to the redbook) contains nothing but zeros and must be 90 seconds long. Overburning uses this leadout to store data.

We used Nero CD Speed to simulate writing to an 80min+ Mirror Max CD-R:

The Pioneer does support 90min CDs and during the overburning test it managed to write up to 92mins on the 80min++ CDR (using 8x speed).

99min CD-Rs

Writing

We tried an "official" (these kind of CDs are way out of the original CD standard) 99-min CD-R and tested the ability of the drive to cope with it:

The Pioneer DVD writer is good at overburning and managed to write a full 99mins worth of data onto a disk at 8x speed - this is slightly more than the Philips DVDRW228k. We verified this figure by actually writing 863MB onto a CD-R disk as shown above.

Reading

In this test we created a disk (x8 writing) using Nero and filled it up to 99.23 mins of data and checked how well the Pioneer could read the disk:

The drive managed to read the full data and only had slight problems when it came to running the seek test. This is one of the best results for this particular test we have ever seen.

CloneCD

CloneCD is a popular program for backing up protected CDs. We checked the capabilities of the drive under CloneCD:

One of the most disappointing things about the Pioneer A04 is that it does not support the DAO-RAW mode and even though it says RAW-SAO compatible the drive doesn't support any RAW mode.

Just as the Pioneer A03 did, when the drive was given the task of writing a CloneCD image it failed with an error shown above.

Reading

We checked the read performance of the popular Safedisk 2 protected game: MaxPayne. Intelligent Bad Sector scanner was turned off and Fast Error Skip was turned on so as to compare it with the other drives.

The drives performance at reading protected CDs has improved since the A03 but the test CD we tried took a very long time using I.B.S off and fast error skip turned on and we had to abort the test. When we re-tried with I.B.S. on, the drive did much better:

Safedisk 2 Read Speed

I 19:14:50 Device Scan found 0 CD-ROMs and 1 CD-Writers!
I 19:17:54 Starting copy from PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-104 to C:\maxpayne.ccd
I 19:17:54 Read Speed for Data Tracks: Maximum
I 19:17:54 Read Speed for Audio Tracks: Maximum
I 19:17:54 Read SubChannel Data from Data Tracks: Yes
I 19:17:54 Read SubChannel Data from Audio Tracks: Yes
I 19:17:54 Fast Error Skip: Yes
I 19:17:54 Don't report read errors: Yes
I 19:17:54 Intelligent Bad Sector Scanner: Yes
I 19:17:54 CD contains CD-Text: No
I 19:17:54 Reading Track 1... (Blocks 0-358329)
W 19:17:54 Device PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-104 doesn't support reading of 96 bytes subchannel data (CD+G)!
I 19:18:20 Fast Error Skip has been enabled automatically!
I 19:55:28 Fast Error Skip has been disabled automatically!
I 20:30:26 Duration of operation: 01:12:31
I 20:30:26 Average Speed: 193 kBytes/s (1.10)
I 20:30:26 Reading finished!

Philips DVDRW228k: Average Speed: 756 kBytes/s (4.30)

Pioneer A04: Average Speed: 193 kBytes/s (1.10)

The drive took 01:12:31 to read the CD in and needed I.B.S on. This is much slower than what the other DVD writers can achieve but it's still an improvement over the A03.

Region Protection

Most new DVD-ROM drives are region protected and will only playback a DVD movie title from a certain region. This is controlled by the use of region codes.

This drive has RPC-II region protection (RPC-2 devices allow you to change the drive's region a certain number of times before they become permanently locked).

Page 4 - Last Updated: 10 August 2002