Author’s page:

Introduction:

On this page, the author of the review has the freedom to run tests that she/he thinks will enhance the review. These tests are unlike our standard tests, which we try to keep consistent throughout the whole review team, so that our reviews are as consistent as possible. This page gives the reviewer the opportunity to show some advanced and real world tests that other review team members may not be able to run.

Real World tests:

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Real world tests are designed to simulate what normal users might use their drives for in everyday use. For example, writing discs with a burning application.

Audio Extraction:

For this test we used EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to test the drive’s Audio extraction performance. As we can see from the screenshot below, the drive supports accurate stream and C2 error info but does not do caching which is good.

Below are the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The Optiarc AD-7240S performed extremely well in burst mode and was a little slower in secure mode, but none the less, was still a little faster than most of our other tested drives in secure mode.

CSS Encrypted DVD-Video ripping tests:

Most modern DVD burners don’t have Video riplock and in most cases will read a pressed DVD-Video SL disc at 16x speed. However, some drives use a CSS riplock when it comes to extracting data from the disc. If you attempt to rip a pressed DVD-Video with CSS encryption to your hard drive, then the ripping speed may be locked at a much lower speed than 16x. To test this feature, we needed a reference from a drive that we know does not employ CSS riplock. We choose the Optiarc AD-7201S as a reference drive for this purpose and ripped an SL and DL pressed DVD-Video to our hard drive using DVDFab 6.0.1.0 (DVD to DVD full disc option with target size matching the source size of the DVD). Below we can see our reference results.

SL CSS encrypted DVD Video disc “Repossessed” (Optiarc AD-7201S reference result)

Time taken = 6m:12s

DL CSS encrypted DVD Video disc “The Green Mile” (Optiarc AD-7201S reference result)

Time taken = 11m:45s

Now let’s test the Optiarc AD-7240S using the same testing procedures.

SL CSS encrypted DVD-Video (Goldeneye):

The Optiarc AD-7240S is not CSS riplocked and ripped our test DVD-Video SL disc in 4 minutes and 51 seconds.

DL CSS encrypted DVD-Video (The Green Mile):

The Optiarc AD-7240S is not CSS riplocked and ripped our test DVD-Video DL disc in 11 minutes and 38 seconds. To compare with other drives, we present the table below.

The Optiarc AD-7240S was pretty fast when ripping our tested DVD-Video media.

Advanced tests:

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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the Optiarc AD-7240S. These tests are: “Sheep Test”, and some special disc tests. For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called sheep test? That’s because the logo of the first 1 to 1 copy program called CloneCD is a sheep. When looking at supported writers, you will notice that the feature list has sheep to indicate if a feature is supported or not. In this case we are interested in the writer’s ability to backup/write weak sectors, also called: “Correct EFM encoding of regular bit-patterns”.

• No sheep: Can’t backup any safedisc 2 versions without the help of software tricks
• 1 Sheep: Can backup safedisc 2 up to version 2.4x without software tricks
• 2 Sheep: Can backup safedisc 2, including version 2.5x
• 3 Sheep: Can write all possible weak sectors, few if any writers could do this.

One of our forum moderators Womble; has written a guide concerning the “Sheep Test” that can be found here. In the screenshot below taken from CloneCD, we see the Optiarc AD-7240S supports everything.

The Optiarc AD-7240S supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the results, the Optiarc AD-7240S is a two sheep burner.

Overburning CD-R:

We tested the Optiarc AD-7240S to see if it could overburn CD-R media. The results are shown below.

700MB (80 minute) over-burn test:

The maximum value that the Optiarc AD-7240S would accept for overburning CD-R media was 92:57.74. We then setup a test burn with CD-Speed set to this size.

As we can see, Optiarc AD-7240S had no problems in writing our test disc. Now let’s see if the drive can read back our created disc.

The Optiarc AD-7240S easily read back the disc that it just wrote. This concludes our Optiarc AD-7240S review. To read the conclusion, click on the link below