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Lite-On CD-RW/DVD Drives
Author: Daniel Topler
Date Posted: April 14th, 2003
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| SLRating (WriteOn 40x24x40x USB 2.0 CD-RW Drive): |
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| SLRating (Internal 52x24x52x CD-RW Drive): |
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Bottom Line:
What happens when your CD Burner breaks, or it's just not fast enough? There are many drives out there we reviewed 3 from Lite-On, but how do they perform, and what did we think? Read on to find out in our official review....
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Lite-On External 24x12x24x8 CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive
Features
- 12.7mm height and high efficient power saving modes for notebook computer use
- SMART-BURN avoiding Buffer Under Run error, Automatically adjusting writing strategy & running OPC to provide the best burning quality
- SMART-X® Smart Monitoring & Adjusting Read-speed Technology for eXtraction
- FDSS® Floating Double Suspension System to reduce vibration & noise during recording & reading
- Support Fixed Packet, Variable Packet, TAO, SAO, DAO, Raw Mode Burning & Over-Burn
- Support formats of CD Family, CD-R & CD-RW discs (up to 99min.)
- Support formats of DVD Family, single/dual layer ( PTPT, OPT ), DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD-RAM ( Optional ) compliant
- Conforms to Orange Book Part 2, 3, Volume 2: High Speed & MMC2 commands
- Support PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2 and Ultra DMA mode 2
- Support Mt. Rainier ( Optional)
First Impressions
When I got the box containing all three Lite-On drives, the drive I was looking forward to the most was the Slim Combo External Drive. It's fast, small, and has a DVD player built in. What more can I ask for? In the box, I found the drive, a power adaptor, USB cable, and an audio cable. There was also Nero Burning Rom, as well as PowerDVD XP, which is a great package. The drive was packed securely, so it shouldn't break while shipping.
Design
The drive itself is extremely small. It's a couple of inches shorter then an internal CD drive, so you can see that it is great for traveling with. It's about an inch tall, and about 5 inches in width.
In the front of the drive, you'll find the eject button, a LED light, and a emergency eject button. On the back, you'll see a power connector, an Audio Out port, and the USB port. On the bottom, there's a sticker with serial number and model number information. According to this sticker, my drive was manufactured in February of this year, so it's a new product.
Installation
Like the WriteOn external drive, installation is extremely easy. Just plug it in to a power source, and then into the USB 2.0 port of your PC, and you're ready to go. You don't need to restart your computer, either.
If you want to use the Nero program for burning CD's, you'll need to put the Nero CD in the drive. A autoplay menu will pop up, with various Lite-On driver options and manuals. You'll also find the installation for Nero and InCD. That's what you need. Once you click there, the Nero installation program started up. After a few clicks and a restart, you'll be ready to burn through Nero.
To view DVD's, you'll need to install a software or hardware DVD encoder if you've never done so before. Hardware DVD encoders are not very common anymore. You can check if you have one. It's a PCI slot on the back of your computer that connects to your graphics card somehow through a cable. If you don't have one, PowerDVD will just do fine. Installing the program is very easy. After you insert the CD, the installation starts up automatically. After following the steps and entering the CD Key, you are ready to go. You can either use PowerDVD or Windows Media Player to view DVD's. Either program works great.
Documentation
Yet again, I was not impressed with the documentation of the drive. It included one setup poster, and a small piece of paper with safety warnings. There are complete manuals in PDF format on the Lite-On Nero CD, but it is somewhat inconvenient to look at a manual on a computer.
DVD Performance
I tested DVD Playback on the Lite-On 24x12x24x8x drive with the Gladiator DVD.
Quality on all scenes of the movie was excellent, and extremely smooth. All colors were sharp and vibrant, and it looked like what any regular DVD player would look like.
Lite-On did an excellent job with the DVD portion of this drive.
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