The Challenge Revealed More Than We Hoped For!, Continued

We extracted each test disc on the test drive. Once the disc was extracted, we burned the test disc to a CDRW to make sure there were no errors in the process. Once we determined that we were ready, we burned our final copy to CDR for testing. We wrote each disc at the CDRW drive's highest, or maximum, speed setting.

Once the CDR test disc was written, we reimaged our test system and then attempted to do a fresh install of each of our test discs. Once each install was complete, we attempted to execute the disc. If the disc functioned correctly, we graded the test as a "PASS." We used the Asus DVD-616 drive in our test system to read all of our test discs. We reimaged the test system between each testing of the discs made from each CDRW drive.

Although it could possibly be argued that Asus had an unfair advantage in having both a reader and writer in our testing, we did test with another DVD-ROM drive and found no evidence of any difference. In other words, we found that the copies that worked in the Asus DVD-ROM drive also worked in a Toshiba DVD-ROM drive.

Blindread/ Blindwrite - Back up Pass/ Fail Test

Both the Asus and the Lite-On drives did seem to perform well on these tests, but it is obvious that disc 3, which uses TAGES, has a problem.

CloneCD - Back up Pass/ Fail Test

Surprise! Our results were a little different using the CloneCD test, but this is due to the fact that CloneCD doesn't support the Amplify Weak Sectors on the U.S. release of the software. If this option were available, our results should be the same as those with Blindread/ Blindwrite (meaning that the CDW-1610A and the LTR-24102B should be able to copy our test disc 2 discs, which require use of the enhancement of weak sectors).