X-bit labs

MSI DR16-B2 DVD±RW Dual Layer Burner: Repeated Success or New Heights? (page 19)

Category: Storage

by Vasily Melnik

[ 09/27/2005 | 09:43 PM ]

Audio Capturing

The rather big read and write offsets and the inability of the drive to read the Lead-out information do not allow me to recommend the MSI DR16-B2 for serious work with audio data. Otherwise, the results are good enough, though. The drive can perform “on the fly” copying at speeds up to 16x inclusive. It can also read the sub-channel data and extract audio tracks at a rather high speed. The average access time is maybe a bit too high.

As for supported audio-capture related features, the lack of caching is an obvious advantage of the reviewed device, but the inability to return C2 errors (at least, in the most popular audio grabbing applications) can increase the total disc copy time considerably.

The new optical drive from MSI performed well in the real audio extraction test, processing both the normal and bad Audio CDs at a high speed. It doesn’t lose much speed on the damaged CD.

Sheep Test

You can read the description of this test here . In brief, its point is simple: the ability of the drive to copy discs protected with various versions of Safe Disc is tested. The developers of the popular CloneCD program have the following classification of optical drives, according to this test:

1. No sheep at all. The device cannot make copies of Safe Disc version 2.0 and higher without certain software tricks.
2. One sheep. The drive can copy versions 2.0-2.4.
3. Two sheep – the drive can copy discs protected with Safe Disc version 2.5.
4. Three sheep – the drive can copy all the possible weak sectors .

The MSI DR16-B2 is a zero sheep drive in this classification. It means that this drive is completely unsuitable for copying protected discs.