The reading aspect of the drive, to begin with, turned out to be pretty good, with the drive reading all discs at speeds according to its specifications. Most reading processes were nice, producing smooth graphs. As far as reading defected CD and DVD media, we can say that the drive can handle the CDs adequately and the DVDs even better. Although not exceptional, it is as good as most of the DVD drives that you can find.

The SmartErase feature is available we liked it, although it is more like an extra feature that someone may play and experiment with it rather than a tool for destroying your discs. It is integrated through Nero Essentials software bundled with the drive, meaning that you should fire the software up in order to use it. How about adding a button on the drive that does the same job instead? :)

Moving on to the drive's writing speed, we have to say that we only found the Yuden discs able to be burned at 22X. Even the Verbatim MCC004 and MCC03RG20 can be burned at no more than 16X. That's a pretty low speed considering the competition. However, such small differences in the writing speed alone don't always matter, as it is also the writing quality that plays an important role in the whole burning process. To worsen things, the LiteOn drive did not manage to make enough acceptable burns. Our tests on most of them reported many uncorrectable digital errors, something that can affect a disc's data integrity when less powerful readers are used and also as time passes and natural deterioration happens.

All in all, we cannot say that the the iHAS422 satisfied us with its overall performance, and we would expect something better from the LiteOn engineers. When you are offering the extreme 22x recording speed with a single MID, you should be able to deliver a decent burning quality at least with it. But still, the drive did not performed much better even at lower DVD burning speeds, making us believe that some extra work should be done in the optimization of the writing strategies the drive uses. The drive retails for just $29 (online price).