LG GSA-2166D

Review Pages

As we mentioned at the beginning of this review, the LG GSA-2166D is the second external, latest release drive from LG, following the LG GSA-5169D. The 5169D had the One Touch recording function which defined it as a unique device. So what does the GSA-2166D have to distinguish it from the 5169D? Being a Super Multi drive, what else would we expect, but LightScribe support. Indeed, the GSA-2166D is a Super Multi device, with LS support among features like DVD-RAM as well as all the media formats.

Let's start by looking at its reading speed. The 2166D made quick work of all inserted media, for both CD and DVD format. What we really enjoyed, was the drive's performance with Write Once media, which was read at 16X speed, similar to the 5169D. DL speed is supported at 8X, while its ripping capabilities were satisfactory, although not that fast, with an average speed of 6.6X. The only drawback was with CD Pressed media, which was not read at the 48X maximum speed according to the manufacturer's specifications. No matter how many times we tried, we could only reach a maximum 42X reading speed.

Moving on to error correction, we can say that the drive can correct and read most defects. The CD error correction mechanism worked well with both the 721 and 726 test discs, even though we would have liked a perfect score with the 726 disc, as is the case with most of the latest release drives. With DVD test media, the drive did even better, reporting good reading with almost all media. There was a drop in speed in the second layer of the 541 test disc, but e reading was completed successfully.

With protected media, the drive's ripping mechanism faced an uphill battle. The standard games were ripped to our hard drive successfully and quite fast. But with the more advanced games, while they were ripped, they could not be backed up successfully. Audio extraction was a similar story, as the drive failed to rip our Key2Audio protected disc.

Burning capabilities of this device can be described as average to good, but not in all cases though. With 16X enabled media and at 16X burning speed, the drive did not manage to perform as well as we expected it too, since LG drives have always produced good burning results. The results were mixed, with sometimes poor CDSpeed graphs, other times bad Plextools scans, and occasionally both. As CDSpeed tends to be more reliable (due to its sensitivity with defective areas) we would say that overall, the burning quality was average. At 8X burning speed, things were better but still, we were getting only average to good quality burns. +RW and -RW burned media results were not satisfactory, neither were DL, with only 1 out of 2 media for each format producing successful discs. CD burning quality was poor, according to the Clover CDX test, which tends to be quite strict when it comes to quality criteria.

In the DVD-RAM arena, the scene remains the same as the previous releases, with 5X burning speed and 25 to 30mins average burning time for a full burn with Nero.

Among its features, CD Overburning is available, but unfortunately the drive does not support DVD Overburning. As always, bitsetting is supported through the automated feature from Nero Properties, and the end user can choose the desired setting upon starting burning session.

The drive's price ranges from US$100 to $US130, including VAT.

- The Good