Optiarc BC-5500S Slim Laptop Drive Review

DVD-RAM Performance:

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The Optiarc BC-5500S drive also supports writing and reading the DVD-RAM format; reading and writing at 5X.

Lets 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 is 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’s 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”. Meaning 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 format.

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.

Lets us take a look how the drive performs:

Maxell branded 5x media manufactured by Maxell. Thanks to Maxell USA for providing this media.

Writing Maxell 5x without verification

Writing Maxell 5x with verification

Transfer Rate test

As we can see, the Optiarc BC-5500S writes 5x DVD-RAM without any problem in 12:20 minutes, reads back the disc at 5x speed.

For those of you who are not familiar with DVD-RAM, you may probably think that something went wrong during the write process with the verification turned on, since the 5x media was written at 1.3x and 2x, respectively. But don’t worry, that is pretty normal for DVD-RAM discs. The reason for the lower writing speed is, the drive constantly reads back the data after writing it to verify that it’s written correctly. We can also call it a “bullet proof” writing/verify technique, with no data loss/errors.

Overall thoughts:

The Optiarc BC-5500S is a very good writer showing Good to Excellent results in burning DVD±R/RW media. In writing DVD±DL media the Optiarc BC-5500S did a good job writing our media at 4x.

Now let’s move to the Authors Page…

• DVD+R DL/-R DL Writing performance
• Authors Page