The LH20A1L drive is LITE ON's brand new burner in the "Super All Write" series. As with most 20X compatible combo drives, the LITE-ON LH20A1L drive was not what someone would call "an ordinary case". Let's take a closer look at the pros and cons.

One of this drive's main advantages, is the fact that its price is among the lowest (US $43.99). On the other hand, the drive's mediocre performance - mostly as far as writing is concerned - gave us a lot of headaches, while at the same time, justifying its low price. The large amount of digital errors that occurred when we scanned the burned discs, had us rubbing our eyes, and surprised at just how many digital errors can occur in one single scanning test.

DVD overburning is not supported by the drive, but booktype is. The CD Error Correction mechanism of the drive is slightly better than average and is one of its few pros. At the same time, the resulting graphs produced from the DVD Error Correction tests, were not encouraging with quite a few speed deviations with our defective DL discs.

We should also mention here, that the support for the Lightscribe disc labeling, is definitely a pro.

We usually nd by saying that future firmware upgrades could address many issues related to the writing strategy of a drive with the various DVD brands. This could be the case here, although we would welcome work on new firmware that truly does fix current MID issues and not just adds support for new MIDs. This of course holds true for all ODD manufacturers.