48x CD-RW Combo Roundup Vol.1 - Page 2

LiteOn has established a strong position in the optical storage market and is always a leader when it comes to manufacturing large quantities of CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives. Recently, the company announced its plans to expand its product line to dual DVD recorders, and has made strategic partnerships with other IC manufacturers to deliver leading DVD writing speeds.

As we mentioned in the first page, we have in our hands the LiteOn LTC48161H CDRW/DVD combo drive. It would be very interesting to see how the drive performs in a straight comparison against the Optorite DC4801.

- Drive features / Specifications

LiteOn LTC48161H supports 48x CAV reading for both the CD-R and CD-RW media. The same speed is used for CD-R writing, while DVD reading can be achieved at 16x CAV maximum.

The drive uses the SMART-BURN feature and a 2MB buffer size to avoid buffer underun errors and keep the writing quality at high levels, while the SMART-X® feature ensures the accurate extraction od bits while reading.

Also the LiteOn combo drive uses the VAS® technology to reduce vibration and noise during recording and reading .

LiteOn came with region Code II selected, and the RPCII region control allows the user to change the region code only 4 more times.

The drive supports reading of all the CD and DVD formats (except DVD-RAM), retrieves C2 error information and is Mount Rainier compliant. In addition, the drive supports RAW DAO 96, packet writing and overburning.

- The package

The retail package includes the LiteOn LTC48161H drive, a quick installation guide, mounting screws and the usual internal audio cable.

The software package includes PowerDVD XP v4.0 DVD playback software, Nero Express v5.5.10.13 (OEM version), one blank CD-R (Ritek), and one LiteOn CD-RW (Plasmon, 10x-24x). The retail package is available at a street price of $55-65.

The front panel of the drive includes the usual headphone jack, the volume control knob, the eject button and the operation LED.

On the rear panel there are the analog and digital outputs, the IDE connector, the device jumper configuration and the typical power input

After removing the screws we can see the drive's internal design:

- Installation

The LiteOn drive was connected on IDE 1 of our test PC as a "Master" and worked under the Ultra DMA Mode 2 transfer mode. The drive was identified as "LITE-ON COMBO LTC-48161H" under WinXP. The firmware version installed and used for the tests was KH0F. By the time we write these lines, a new firmware has been released, adding support for more media. The new firmware (vKHOK) version is available here.