CD-MRW (Mt. Rainier Format)

As we said earlier Mt. Rainier format added in the InCD v3.14. The Mt. Rainier format promises shorten format time among with data defect management (on the drive) and several other improvements. So far no Os (including WinXP) supports the Mt. Rainier format but that will change by the end of this year...Note that the CD-RW/ROM drives that do not support CD-MRW format cannot read the CD-MRW formatted disc for now, because of lack of read driver that supports CD-MRW format. Ahead plans to provide the special read driver for legacy CD-RW/ROM drives in near future.

After installing InCD v3.14 we can see the option to format a HS-RW disc to the CD-MRW format. Just mark the 'Format disc to CD-MRW' option in the InCD Page Settings in the Properties to enable formatting as CD-MRW format before starting formatting a CD-RW disc:

Then we proceed with the formatting of the disc:

We leave the default settings:

Formatting started. It takes just 2 minutes:

After formatting has ended our disc has the same empty space as with the normal packet writing method:

Lets proceed to the actual testing now...Or we should wait? As you may know the 2minutes format is what the users must do in order activate the CD-MRW format. Afterwards the drive automatically continues the background formatting until it ends. Of course you can use the formatted disc to write data but this way the total writing time increases since the drive have to format-write-read the same at the same time. So its advised to leave the drive finish the background formatting.

How you will know it? Simple. Wait about 10mins or when you see the drive stop working. There's no LED indication on the drive to show this neither any warning from the software (InCD).

According to the Yamaha engineers "...CD-MRW requires 1.5x or 2x time to write a data than normal packet writing if the background formatting is not finished. Also the writing time on CD-MRW is very much depending on the quality of media.

a) After the initial format (1 - 2 min), a user can write a data on CD-RW media with Verification mode activated. Verification mode is automatically enabled in order to provide against defect part on un-formatted area of CD-RW media. When the background format (actual format) is finished, a user can select whether verification is on or off. The background format (actual format) requires same time as UDF1.5 format time.

b) When the writing and the verification are activated, continuous packet writing is impossible. It means that large data writing requires a lot of accesses. If the writing data is less than 2MB, the drive can write a data without many accesses because the data can be stored on the buffer..."

In case you wondering which UDF version should be used:

UDF 2.01 is format for video recording onto rewritable media, such as DVD+RW.
UDF 1.5 is format for packet writing with defect management by host PC.
UDF 1.02 is format for packet writing.

- The test

We used the same procedure as with normal packet writing. We copied a 403 MB file (403.147 kbs) from a Hard Disk (on the same PC as the writers) to the formatted CD-MRW media using Windows Explorer (we dragged and dropped) and we completed the test twice to eliminate any possible time measurement faults and user errors. We performed our tests after 30mins of the initial format of the media to make sure that background formatting has ended. The results are interesting:

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. Yamaha promised that both reading/writing performance would be increased with future firmware updates. Lets hope it will...