DVD-RAM writing performance:

The Pioneer BDR-203BK is a so-called Multi drive, meaning it also supports the DVD-RAM format.

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’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 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.

Now let’s burn a test disc.

The Pioneer BDR-203BK wrote our test Verbatim 5x DVD-RAM media in 11 minutes and 6 seconds.

Now let’s try and read back our test disc.

The Pioneer BDR-203BK had no problems in reading back our test DVD-RAM media using a 5x CLV reading method.

We then used CD-Speed to run a Scan Disc test using the Pioneer BDR-203BK on our burned media.

As we can see from the above screenshot, there are no errors on our disc.

Summary:

The Pioneer BDR-203BK had no problems in reading and writing our test DVD-RAM media.

Let’s head on to the next page, where we test BD-R/RE writing performance….