Mt. Rainier Format Tests

TEAC CD-W540E is the first 40x recorder drive that supports the famous Mt. Rainier format. Already, Yamaha CRW3200E and Mitsumi CR-480ATE support this feature. At the properties tab of InCD v3.24.3 we can see the Mt. Rainier option.

Before we start the format process, let's see the disc status. Nero reports that the Ricoh HS-RW media is empty and no MRW format is present:

The formatting process, is now shorter:

The format is finished, within less than 2 minutes, and our disc is ready for use:

After we completed our tests, we checked again the formatting process. Nero now reports that formatting is still in progress. We will have to wait until 17mins to end before being able to use the media in other system.

For testing, we decided to eject the media. Remember the formatting process is not complete. InCD prompts that needs to add information about the track/session in order to be readable in other systems. The process will take up to 1minute:

After the disc is ejected, InCD displays a confirmation window:

Let's now check the formatting process. Nero reports that background formatting is being suspended. The problem now is how will it be resumed? We are not so sure...

If you leave the disc in the drive for about 20minutes the background formatting process will finish. There is no indication to user when this ended so you will have to wait. Nero reports now that disc formatting has ended:

We had installed a Plextor PX-40TS in the test PC. We tried to read the written data of the CD-MRW disc, but we only got a readme.txt file with the following content:

Hmm.. So what's going on? Only CD-MRW enabled recorders can see the contents? For now yes, until either Ahead or Microsoft releases the proper driver. We also noticed that if you "early" (before background formatting finishes) eject- insert and re-eject the disc, InCD will ask again for 1 minute in order to add information to the disc. We are not so sure if this is normal or it's a bug of InCD.

- Recording Tests

For testing the Mt. Rainier performance of the TEAC/Mitsumi/Yamaha drive(s), we performed two tests. Mitsumi CR-480ATE was tested with v1.0E and Yamaha CRW3200E with v1.0d firmware revisions.

First Test

After the format process, we immediately start the recording process (drag & drop). When the drive finishes, we start the reading process back to the HD. At this mode, the drive writes, reads the quality of the written data and background formats the disc at the same time. The recording performance of each drive is displayed in the below table:

The faster drive at this mode comes from TEAC. The drive seems robust enough to finish this test first and without any glitches. Mitsumi CR-480ATE comes third with 2.38X. The Yamaha CRW3200E did came second during the write process with 2.55X. Afterwards when trying to access the written data, the PC locked and the drive didn't respond. After rebooting the disc was empty. Maybe it's a bug of either InCD or from the CRW3200E drive itself. The Mitsumi CR-480ATE is the faster drive at the reading process with 5.40X.

Second Test

At the second test, we left the drive alone to complete the background formatting and afterwards, we repeated the above tests. The recording/reading performance in this case is higher for all the drives, since now only record & read are performed. The disc has been scanned for bad sectors during the format process:

The faster drive at both reading/writing comes from Yamaha. The CRW3200E with the v1.0d firmware has 3.89X writing and 18.32X reading speeds. The drive didn't showed the weird behaviour we had at the first test. The Mitsumi CR-480ATE comes second with 3.34X writing and 8.76X reading speed. TEAC CD-W540E didn't performed so well with only 2.65X writing and increased 7.03X reading speeds.

- Mt. Rainier performance conclusion

As we can see writing at a CD-MRW formatted HS-RW takes double the time to end the task than with the normal packet writing format. That is happening since the drive not only writes, but also monitors the quality of the written data to avoid problems. Future firmware updates can improve the drive's reading/writing performance. Also higher re-writing speeds will boost the Mt. Rainier performance.

As a side note, we must say that only Mitsumi CR-480ATE has taken Philips "EasyWrite" logo that ensures the proper implementation of Mt. Rainier format...