This drive is one of few drives that also supports the DVD-RAM format. Let us look at the recording side of the disc, and as you can see it has differences from the other DVD+R/W/R9 DL and DVD-R/W discs.

We can see a very fascinating pattern of darker spots. These tick marks are "address information" ("Pre-mastered Pit Header Field") which are embedded onto the disc. This is header information in front of data sector area, and is the same format as HDD and MO.

A DVD-RAM disc can be formatted in the following formats:

FAT32
UDF 1.02
UDF 1.50
UDF 2.00
UDF 2.01
UDF 2.50

By formatting a DVD-RAM disc with FAT32 it will act like a removable hard drive and all writing will be done as “background processes”. This means you do not have to wait for it to finish, you can start or work with other applications while the DVD-RAM is working without noticing any “hangs” or CPU slowdowns.

DVD-RAM has error correction, but also has error replacement to spare sectors as a "defect management" function. This gives higher reliability than other DVD formats.

Another advantage with DVD-RAM is that the discs can be formatted/erased/written at over 100,000 times before it will/can cause/report any errors. Let’s try to read back the disc that we wrote:

Lets us take a look at the media we are going to use in these tests.

Maxell 12x rated DVD-RAM media

As we can see, the Lite-On iHAS524 wrote our 12x DVD-RAM media at its maximum rated speed of 12x in 5 minutes and 43 seconds.

Now let’s see if the Lite-On iHAS524 can read our test disc.

There was a slowdown in our read-back test, but I would like to point out that this disc is old and worn, and this could be the reason for the slowdown. Unfortunately I can’t find a source for this media to replace it.

We then ran a CD-Speed’s Scandisc function to check the disc for errors.