INSTALLATION

The A05 / 105 is an IDE drive and like most CD/DVD drives the installation was simple. The drive was detected in Windows XP without any problems.

Auto insert notification was enabled but we disabled it by changing the registry key "KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Cdrom/Autorun=0". DMA is normally successfully turned on by default (if Windows XP can detect it). We experienced no difficulty or strange behaviour during installation.

Above we have a screenshot from Infotool 1.02 as it examines the A05 - it reveals some important features which we will examine in this review.

It is reporting that the Read speed is: 32 x and write speed is 16 for CD-R disks. This is faster than the Philips 228k (32 read & 12 speed write) and the Pioneer A04. The buffer of this drive is 2,000KB (no change from the A04).

You can see from above, that it can can also read the DVD Alliance format's "+" disks i.e. DVD+R & DVD+RW but not DVD-RAM disks. The drive supports a buffer underrun protection system for CDs and DVDs and can report C2 errors. Its reporting that the drive can write CD-Text, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R and CD-RWs disks. This drive also does not support the packet writing standard "Mount Rainer" which is available in newer CD writers.

The drive's installation was a breeze - it only took 10 minutes from disassembly of the PC to having the DVD burner up and running.



Our review drive is an August 2002 model that came shipped with firmware version 0.70 (no update is available as the drive isn't out for another 4 weeks).

The software we used for this review was: DiskJuggler 4.01.1002, Nero 5.5.9.14, Record Now Max 4.12 DX & CloneCD 4.0.1.10.



The above shows what Nero (5.5.9.14) finds about the drive. You can see it supports the overburning of CDs and the writing of CD-Text information. The maximum writing speed of CD-Rs is 16 speed with support for DAO/96 and cuesheet modes. The DVD high compatibility option has appeared and is used to aid compatibility with certain DVD players (by padding the disk with dummy data to a minimum of 1GB).





The above screen shots are from DiscJuggler 4.01.1002 with more information revealed. We can see that it reads DVD's at x 12 speed which is very good but it's only for single layered DVD-ROMs. Diskjuggler also reports that it can rip audio CDs at 32 X speed - another improvement over the A04. The A05 can read the "R->W" subcodes.

The A05 can only write to CD-RWs at 8 speed (which is slightly slower than the Philips 228k's 10 speed) and DVD-RWs at x2 (the report above is wrong). The drive can now read and write full 96 bytes sub-codes "PQ" & "P->W".

Added:  Wednesday, October 23, 2002
Reviewer:  Ed

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