Lite-on SOHW-1673S

LiteOn drives generally cut the mustard quite well in our reviews, even though they can be loud and clumsy looking. They are often the enthusiast's drive of choice due to the availability of a utility that lets users change the book-type of DVD media, forcing DVD-R, DVD+R or DVD+R DL discs to be burnt as DVD-ROM discs in a bid to make them readable in players that generally don't accept those discs.

If you plan to burn DVD+R DL discs with this drive, then you will require a lot of patience. Our 2.4X DVD+R DL discs took over 44 minutes to complete, even though Nero reported a 4X transfer rate during the burn. Single layer burns were also quite slow, and this drive was not capable of burning to our 8X DVD-R discs at 8X; instead the maximum transfer rate it could use on these discs was 6X. Nero CD/DVD Speed reported this drive to be using the CAV method for writing and reading. It also produced a "coaster" during our DVD+R burning test.

A test of dual layer burning produced a disc that could not be read in our old Pioneer 106D DVD burner. It was picked up without problems in our Zensonic Z330 media player, though.

It wasn't all gloom for this drive though, as it produced some of the finest CD burning and reading results in our tests.