Writing Quality And Media Compatibility, Continued

We deactivated Smartburn for the next set of measurements. All media is rated at 40x.

The results show that Smartburn is certainly worth having. The figures for the Verbatim CD make its benefits particularly clear. Although you can shave 10 seconds off the overall writing time by switching Smartburn off, you will greatly increase the chances of producing coasters if you do so. The diagram shows why.

Data corruption. The yellow, vertical lines indicate defective sectors; red lines show unreadable areas.

As you can see, the drive has a real problem reading the data. Nearly 7% of the sectors are so badly corrupted that they are completely unreadable.

Here is a summary of our tests using three different RW media.

FrisbyII Writing Quality: TAO mode

It looks like burning RWs isn't really the FrisbyII's favorite job, because we were unable to burn data that was entirely free of errors. When using CD-RWs, we would therefore recommend that you limit the writing speed strictly to the maximum speed specified for your media. Otherwise you run the risk of creating a RW disc with an unacceptable number of errors. The drive shows the interesting effect (and it is not alone here) that the last sectors of the TAO data CD-RW are unreadable. We found the same thing with data CD-Rs in TAO mode.

Using DAO mode, we got the following results:

FrisbyII Write Quality: DAO mode

In DAO mode, too, it is advisable not to exceed the writing speed specified for the media, since doing so will increase the error rate and make it difficult for other drives to read the burned disc.