52x Roundup Vol. 1 - Page 7

CDR Tests

Both the SONY CRX220E1 and AOpen CRW5224 support 52X-writing speed. The SONY CRX-220E1 supports 4X, 8X, 12X, 16X (CLV), 24X (P-CAV), 32X (P-CAV), 40X (P-CAV), 48X (CAV) and 23-52X (CAV) writing speeds.

The Sony CRX-220E1 uses the "SmartBurn" feature in order to maintain the best writing quality for the inserted media. The maximum allowed writing speed is adjusted according to the disc specifications. Nero Burning Rom allows user to enable/disable the feature in the "choose drive" tab.

The AOpen CRW5224 supports 8X, 12X, 16X (CLV), 24X, 32X, 40X and 52X (CAV) writing speeds.

When JustSpeed is activated and inserted media is not supported for writing at the maximum speed, the drive will lower the maximum speed down to 24X. De-activating JustSpeed will enable writing at the maximum speed.

- Recording Tests

The amount of the data we burned was 704MB (80:01:26), for all the drives. The SONY CRX220E1 finishes the task first with 149secs (2:29mins) and the AOpen CRW5224 comes second with 151secs (2:31mins). The Sony CRX-210E1 is slower by only 7secs!

The above graph shows the recording performance differences of the three tested drives in all supported speeds. The results are the best we had for each speed. As we can see the AOpen CRW5224 was the slower drive in almost all-recording speed except the maximum (52X). Remember that the drive is still under development and changes will happened towards the retail version. We noticed that the drive took enough time during the PCA calibration that adds few seconds, else would probably had even lower recording time(s).

Its interesting that at the 24X writing speed the AOpen uses not P-CAV (23-24X) but CAV (11-24X) making the drive very slow, slight faster than a 16X CLV drive. The two SONY drives compete each other and in two recording speeds (16X, 24X) have the exact same results, while at 32X, 40X, 48X the SONY CRX-210E is faster!

Below is a table that shows the time differences compared to the 16X (CLV) recording speed for each drive. We also calculated the % difference for each recording speed (gain in recording time by %).

With an AOpen CRW5224 at 52X (CAV), users will notice the higher difference compared to the 16X (CLV) since the drive at 16X took extra time to finish the task. The drive would be 57.10% faster. The SONY CRX-220E1 users will see slight lower gains, not only in the maximum speed (54.15%) but also in the rest recording speeds.

- AOpen CRW5224 recording results

- SONY CRX220E1 recording results

The SONY CRX220E1 showed a strange behaviour with several media and only with one type of media had the best performance (2:29mins)

With several media, the drive when reached 51X (at 97-99%), dropped the writing speed at either 40X, 32X or even 16X as the following screen shot from Nero shows. Of course this increases the total recording time up to 2:36-2:45 (depending the drop of the writing speed). The same effect noticed at also the 48X writing speed. This shows the interference of SmartBurn in order to protect user from a bad burn...

- Overburning Tests

The AOpen drive can overburn up to 95 mins, while the SONY drive up to 99mins without any problems.

- CD-Text Results

Both drives can read/write CD-Text without any problems.

- CloneCD Writing Tests

The CloneCD software reports that the drive supports the DAO-RAW feature. With the use of proper media, DAO-RAW writing can be performed up to 52X (CAV). For checking the drive's EFM correction status, we used 3 different game titles with different SafeDisc 2 versions with the latest software patches installed. We used each drive as reader/writer at maximum reading/recording speed. Two discs were burned for each game (Amplify Weak Sectors On/Off). Note that for the "Sims - Unleashed game title we used PadusDJ as the reading/recording software, since CloneCD has some problems with the latest SafeDisc builds. The results are posted in the below table:

As you can see, both the Sony and the AOpen drives didn't have any problems backup SafeDisc v2.5x.xx ~ 2.8x.xx builds. The Amplify Weak Sector function will not make any difference in that case. It is very interesting that finally an AOpen drive, that uses RICOH chipsets, can backup the SD2 patterns without the help of software patch (like the AWS setting)...