- CD Format

Like all recent LiteOn drives, the 165P6S supports up to 48X reading speed for CD media (pressed) and 32X for Re-writable CD media. What follows are the graphs of average, start and max reading speeds achieved by each drive with the test media.

In the case of CD media, the LiteOn and BenQ both support 48X reading speed while the Plextor, 42X. As a result, the first two were faster with the LiteOn reporting a marginally higher speed. In the case of CD-RW media, the LiteOn supports only up to 32X reading speed so it was slower than the other two drives.

- AudioCD

For these tests, we used a pressed AudioCD and the Advanced DAE CDSpeed feature.

As we can see from the Average DAE Speed and CD-Speed Advanced DAE Quality tests, all three drives performed equally well with minor differences. In the CD-Speed Advanced DAE Quality test, the LiteOn drive reported an overall quality score of 100 and an average DAE speed of 33.75X, while it supports Leadin and Leadout reading, as well as CD Text and Subchannel Data.

- 90mins Audio disc

- 99mins Audio disc

Unfortunately, the drive cannot read either of our 90 mins or 99 mins audio discs.

- DVD Format

We complete the reading tests, this time using pressed SL and DL DVD media to test the drives reading capabilities with DVD media and post the results in the following graphs.

All three drives support up to 16X reading speed with Pressed SL media, hence the speed differences between them are negligible.

The two layers of a PTP DVD-ROM disc are read sequentially with the drive starting reading from the inner part of the disc, which is the beginning of each layer, progressing towards the outer range, for each layer. Maximum supported speed from the LiteOn drive is 8X in this case, while the other two drives support 12X.

The graph shown above indicates the reading performance of the drive with OTP dual layer media. The first layer of an OTP dual layer DVD-ROM is read exactly the same way as the first layer of the PTP disc we tested previously. The difference here is the reading strategy of the second layer of the disc. The beginning of the second layer is located in the outer part of the disc, so the drive starts reading from the outer tracks towards the inner part of the disc. Again, the LiteOn only supports 8X max and so is slower than the BenQ and Plextor drives.

With DVD±R/RW media, both the LiteOn and Plextor drives support up to 12X for all formats. Only the BenQ supports 16X for DVD±R.

Ripping speed is somewhat average from the LiteOn, and slow in comparison to the ripping capabilities of the other two drives.

Overall, good reading capabilities but without excessive reading speeds with all the tested formats. We would however like to see 16X reading capability with DVD±R media and a higher ripping speed.

- Appendix

Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

• CD Pressed / US-RW
• DVD Pressed SL / DVD Pressed PTP DL / DVD Pressed OTP DL / DVD-R / DVD-RW / DVD+R / DVD+RW