- Mount Rainier Test Suite

All the Mt Rainier compliant drives should be standardized and should meet the hardware and software requirements. The drives are approved by the Mt Rainier group and get the "EasyWrite" logo, as a certification of the Mt Rainier compliance.

The Mount Rainier Verification test is to assure that any media from a Mount Rainier recorder drive can be read and written in any Mount Rainier capable drive. The tests consist of two parts

- To check the Mt Rainier drive functionality using good media
- A reliability / robustness check with emphasis on defect management using test media with defects

The available tools and services are the Mount Rainier Test Suite, the logical verification tool and the discs with standardized defects.

The purpose of functionality test available in the Mount Rainier Test Suite are to assure the capability of the drive to handle Mt Rainier specific functionality like early eject, correct de-icing, format resume etc…

The Test Suite and the test discs are available from Philips only companies that related with either the hardware or software development of Mt. Rainier.

- The Test Discs

The media used for the tests are both normal blank HS-RW media among with pressed artificial defected Mt Rainier discs. Since an important part of the Mt Rainier functionality is related to defect management, the Mt rainier compatible drives should be able to handle discs with spots, scratches, and heavy fingerprints.

Philips provides such defected discs with the following artificial made problems:

- 1. Heavy fingerprint
- 2. Black dot (2 mm)
- 3. Scratch (1.5 x 1.5 mm)

For each drive, Philips suggests the use of a package that contains 5 blank HS-RW and 5 blank HS-RW media with defects. Both the Mount Rainier Test suite and the test discs are available from Philips (http://www.licensing.philips.com). The price for a Mount Rainier Test Disc set is Euro 100.

In future, the defects upon the test discs are expected to change in order to discourage manufacturers who will possibly design their drives just to pass the current test disc. Lastly, note that the current Mt. Rainier verification test suite checks only a part of the whole Mt. Rainier format commands. It is expected that Philips will release new scripts (Part B) in the near future.