Reading Physically Damaged CD-ROM Discs

The CD-related part of the review is concluded with a test of the drive’s error-correction logic with the help of a damaged CD-ROM disc.

The drive took 7 minutes and 10 seconds to read the test disc and found 5 blocks unreadable. That’s an average result. While reading the disc quite quickly, the drive doesn’t show good error-correcting skills (it’s rather too much to have 5 read errors).

On passing the first problematic point, the drive’s speed becomes chaotic. It suddenly accelerates or slows down almost to a halt, producing an irregular read graph and unread blocks on the outermost tracks of the disc. Thus, this drive can work with low-quality media, but you shouldn’t expect it to read very bad discs.