Ricoh MP5240A Vs AOpen DRW4410 - Page 9

Data Protected DiscTests

To create the image of the various protected titles to the hard disk, we used Alcohol 120% software and the appropriate settings, according to the protection type of the inserted discs. Both drives support the RAW DAO 96 writing mode, and reading of reading of subchannel data information from data/audio tracks. Below are summarized the capabilities of the drives, according to CloneCD software:

The game titles we used for each protection scheme are illustrated in the table below:

- PSX Pressed Media

Both drives gave similar ripping times, with Ricoh to have a slight lead with 2:15 minutes.

- SafeDisc v.2

Both drives needed approximately 3 minutes to create the image of the game. The average reading speed for the Ricoh drive is 1888.69 sectors/sec, and the AOpen drive is slightly slower. The supported speed is high for this protection and very compatible to other CD-RW/DVD drives.

- SecuROM

The SecuROM protected title was read fast and the duration for each process was only 2:35 minutes for AOpen DRW4410 and almost the same for Ricoh MP5240A-DP.

- Writing Tests

The Alcohol software reports that both drives supports the DAO-RAW writing mode. For checking the EFM correction level, we used 3 different game titles with different SafeDisc 2 versions with the latest software patches installed. After making the images of the various titles to the hard disk, we burned them (maximum speed) with Alcohol 120%. Two different discs were created for each title; one with the "Bypass EFM error" enabled and one more with the function disabled.

In the table below you can see whether the produced backups were working (game installed / played normally), or not.

Both drives cannot create working backups of the latest SafeDisc protected titles, at least without the appropriate contribution from the burning software. The SafeDisc v2.60 & v2.80 builds were handled correctly as long as the "Bypass EFM error" feature is enabled. In other case, the backup does not work.