Home > Consumer Reviews > 22X DVDrw Sata Retail Drive

Excellent drive so far, no errors in dvds I've burnt at 16x. I haven't tried it at its maximum recordable speed of 22x since this dvds are not available yet. The drive comes with 2 faceplates (beige and black), Nero burning software and SATA cable. Installing was a breeze, Windows will recognize the drive at startup.

Lite on has been on the market for quite a while and makes durable hardware, my 5 year old lite-on dvd drive its still running with no errors.

I have had experience with hundreds of various optical media drives in my field. I've worked with all brands and connectors, Plextor to LG, SCSI to USB. I have run across a lot of duds and some real gems. As a rule of thumb I narrowed down my preferences, price per performance I would generally look towards Pioneer while choosing Plextor for critical, must-have reliability. I was in a situation where I needed a replacement drive for my personal system and decided to try something different.

I went for this LiteOn model because it has nice speeds, LightScribe ability, and it is a SATA drive for a very competitive price. How could you not want to try it out? I have been using it for making quick backups of data three times a week and using the handy LightScribe feature to put a small table of contents right on on the disc. I have not had a bad burn in what looks like over 120 CDs and DVDs. The drive is certainly very speedy and testing the ability to rip CDs and DVDs for backup is really overshadowed the Plextor drive it had replaced. The drive has done everything I have asked of it. It has been about five months since I purchased this drive and I can certainly say I am very impressed and have even started adding it into workstations for clients. I have had no complaints yet.

I own 2 of these, installed in same PC. After a month they suddenly both disappeared at the same time from MyComputer. Both reported driver either missing or corrupt in Device Manager. I have 10 years of IT experience and after hours of discovering Liteon DOESN'T provide a driver, and exhausting a dozen possible resolutions I was stumped. Went to Tom's Hardware and found my exact problem listed. The response by a fellow IT professional says he sees it occasionally, it's an odd bug and ONLY a Windows operating system reinstall can fix it (till it happens again). That sounds extreme, but so far that's the only resolution I can come up with also. I'm visiting Amazon today to buy a different brand and thought I'd share my frustrating experience with future victims.

UPDATE: Microsoft KB314060 provided instructions for editing your registry and correcting this issue. Did it and it worked.

I've owned quite a few different CD and DVD readers and recorders over the years, and this is without a doubt the best I've ever seen! A few of the highlights:

- Very fast accurate audio ripping. Between 15x and 40x ripping speed based on distance from center of the disc) with EAC Burst mode, or 15x-30x in Secure mode in Secure mode. Drive supports C2 error data. Both burst and secure modes produced accurate extraction, according to AccurateRip.

- Excellent DVD read reliability. With my old burner (NEC ND-3550A), I had a few brands of media that appeared to be producing low quality burns. Those already-burned discs read just fine with this drive. PI and PO levels are great. The drive supports DVDInfoPro and K-Probe quality scanning tools.

- Great DVD burn quality. My preferred media (YUDEN000T02) gives a 99.35% burn quality according to DVDInfoPro. This same media on my old drive gave 95.35%. PI Peak, Avg, PIF Peak, Avg of 11:3:2:0 vs 24:8:8:1 on the 3550A.

- Tolerant of poor quality DVD media. Just for the heck of it, I tried burning the lowest quality DVD media known to man: PRINCO. It worked fine. Parity rated: 31:8:4:0. I wouldn't put anything that I trusted on this media, but the fact that it burns and verifies without error is pretty impressive.

The retail drive comes with cable, additional faceplate and Nero software. Installation is painless, Windows identified the drive as ATAPI iHAS322 8 in device manager. Nothing at all about Lite-On but it works as it should,and it's quite so no complaint.