90min & 99min CDRs

90min CD-Rs

Overburning a CDR allows you to get more capacity from your disks by writing more data than specified by the manufacturer of the disk. Note: there is a difference between overburning and 99min CDRs, as 99mins 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).

We used Nero CD Speed to simulate a writing to an 80min+ Mirror Max CD-R, until it coastered:

As shown in the screen shot, the drive supported overburning and managed to write up to 91.57mins on the 80min+ CDRs (also known as 90min CDRs).

99min CD-Rs

Writing

Next we tried some officially branded 99min Infiniti CD-Rs, to push the drive a little bit further:

This time the drive got further and allowed us to burn 98.58 mins on a normal 99min approved CD-R media. We verified this figure was correct by actually writing 863MB onto a CD-R disk.

Reading

Just because a drive can write 99min of data doesn't necessarily mean that it will read the disks up to that limit as well. Often, drives will happily write up to 100mins but when it comes to reading beyond spec. they wont read more than your average CD-ROM. In this test we created a disk (x12 writing) using Nero and filled it up to 98.11 mins of data and checked how much it could read:

In this case the Philips behaved like most drives and wouldn't read the full 98mins of data that it had written. It can only read up to 85 mins.

CloneCD

CloneCD is a popular program for backing up protected CDs. It requires certain features from a drive to function correctly. The important feature one should look for is: DAO RAW, so it can write data uncorrected (failing this SAO RAW is preferred).

We checked the capabilities of the drive under Clone-CD:

The writing modes available in CloneCD are: DAO RAW / SAO RAW.

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 drive had good performance up until 70% of the way through until it slowed down dramatically. Good performance in this case was 24 x average reading until it got to 70% and then things went bad, it started getting slower and slower and at one point it was only reading 50K/Bytes a second. So we aborted the test.

Not one for giving up we tried it with Intelligent Bad Sector scanner turned on and it gave a good all round result:

I 00:10:24 Device Scan found 0 CD-ROMs and 1 CD-Writers!
I 00:10:43 Starting copy from PHILIPS DVDRW228 to C:\maxpayne.CCD
I 00:10:43 Read Speed for Data Tracks: Maximum
I 00:10:43 Read Speed for Audio Tracks: Maximum
I 00:10:43 Read SubChannel Data from Data Tracks: Yes
I 00:10:43 Read SubChannel Data from Audio Tracks: Yes
I 00:10:43 Fast Error Skip: Yes
I 00:10:43 Don't report read errors: Yes
I 00:10:43 Intelligent Bad Sector Scanner: Yes
I 00:10:43 CD contains CD-Text: No
I 00:10:43 Reading Track 1... (Blocks 0-358329)
I 00:10:53 Fast Error Skip has been enabled automatically!
I 00:11:24 Fast Error Skip has been disabled automatically!
I 00:29:14 Duration of operation: 00:18:31
I 00:29:14 Average Speed: 756 kBytes/s (4.30)
I 00:29:14 Reading finished!

It took 18mins to read the CD and but needed additional help i.e. I.B.S. on.

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.

Region Codes are part of the DVD standard. The region number defines the region of the DVD-ROM drive and its playback hardware/software. I downloaded the latest version of Drive Region Info to check the status of the region code for this drive.

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: 25 July 2002