Ricoh MP7163A-DP 16x 10x 30x Review

by Wayne, 17th September 2001

JustLink :

Although not as well known perhaps as Sanyo's BurnProof technology, JustLink offers the same advantages in that it eliminates failed burns resulting from buffer underruns. The basic weakness that plagued all CD-RWs until recently was that if the stream of data to the drive was interrupted for even a fraction of a second, the burn failed and you had no option but to bin the disk. Although the drives had built in buffers (temporary storage memory) to help them try to ride out any disruptions, unless the data kept coming at a fast enough rate sooner or later the buffer would empty and the burn would fail, a buffer underrun.

Many companies looked into ways of overcoming the problems of buffer underruns, but the problem was that in order to be able to stop the recording before a buffer underrun occured and then allow it continue when that data began to arrive again, it was necessary to insert a "link section", a small flag on the data track that essentially joined the two parts of the recording process together. The problem was that laser definition at the time meant the "link section" was just too big and was seen by the drive reading the CD as a data error which promptly ceased reading assuming the disk to be corrupt.

Just link was researched and created independantly by Ricoh and addressed the problem of the buffer underrun by reducing the size of the "link section" to less than 2 microns, well withing Orange Book specifications and virtually invisible to the drive doing the reading.

 

 

JustSpeed :

To further enhance the reliability during high speed writing, Ricoh also introduced a technology known as JustSpeed. JustSpeed performs several checks prior tp burning to ensure the recording speed is suitably matched to the quality of the media in use.
With JustSpeed enabled, the drive first reads the blank disk's ATIP information. This is the name of the manufacturer and other specific details that are prerecorded to the blank during manufacture.
Next a test write is performed to the OPC area of the disk, and finally, a test is run to check how accurately the drive servo is able to follow the tracks on the outer circunfrence of the disk. This last step basically checks for track drift caused by poor manufacturing methods.

With information on all these checks the drive is able to decide the optimum recording speed for the media in use, and adjusts itself automatically between 12x and 16x.

Page 3, Other features and software>>>

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