Backing up protected games:
How good are the drives at backing up protected games? For this test we used CloneCD which is one of the best programs to backup protected applications. For those interested in reading how the different protections work and how they could be Identified, you can read our articles
This is the settings we used to read ALL the games, we’ve found this setting to work in most cases, yes we know that not all protections have subchannel data so it’s really not needed every time. And for the intelligent bad sector scanner: With many protections this will speed up the reading, but we’ll leave it off since it has caused problems for us more than one time!
And this is my write settings, since the Mitsumi do not support ‘Correct EFM encoding of regular bit-patterns” I had to enable ‘Amplify weak sectors” to get working backups.
| Protection/game | Mitsumi read | Lite-on read | Mitsumi backup work | Lite-On backup work |
| Safedisc / Dungeon Keeper 2 | 57:22 | 7:54 | Yes | Yes |
| Safedisc 2 / Max payne | 45:06 | 7:26 | Yes* | Yes |
| Securom new / Diablo 2 Expansion | 2:16 | 2:18 | Yes | Yes |
| CDCops 2.04/Flaaklypa grand prix expansion | 3:07 | 2: 49 | No | No |
| Tagé¨s / Motoracer 3 | 2:55 | 241 | No | No |
| Physical errors / Settlers 3 | 57:23 | 11h 31m 28s | Yes | Yes |
| Laserlock / Desperados | 1h 15m 52s | 3h 25m 12s | Yes | Yes |
| Protect CD / Settlers 3: Quest of the amazons | 4h 30m 11s | 20m 36s | Yes | Yes |
| Safedisc 2 v2.51.021 / Serious sam 2 | 45:10 | 7:21 | No | Yes |
*Only with ‘amplify weak sectors” enabled while writing.
Both drives are able to backup a wide variety of protections, the Lite-On is faster at reading safedisc 1 and 2 protected discs, but is dirt slow at reading physical errors and laserlock.
The Mitsumi is lacking ‘Correct EFM encoding of regular bit-patterns” support, and because of this it can’t successfully beat Safedisc 2 version 2.51.021. The Lite-On is the winner of this test since it does support it.
Reading protected audio discs:
We only had one protected audio disc available and that is a Cactus datashield CDS100 CD. It’s Westlife: World of our own.
Result: Not much to say, both drives failed to extract any data from the disc. Program used: Feurio, CloneCD and Exact audio copy.
