Home > Consumer Reviews > Lite On 52x24x52 CDRW Drive

You may not have heard of Lite On before, but just because the brand isn't well known doesn't make it an inferior product to the more expensive 'name brand' products out there.

The Lite On drive is very easy to install, simply connct up the data cable, power lead and screw it into your case and it's installed - nothing could be easier!

The drive is automatically recognised once you have installed it and it's simply a matter of installing the bundled copy of Nero Burning Rom which lets you make music CDs, compilations, data and even Video CDS (VCD and SVCD format supported).

In action the drive is obviously incredably fast, burning discs at a phenomenal rate. Generally you will find that the thing which slows the process down is that cheaper brand disks only allow burning up to about 16x, or maybe 24x, but having the ability to go faster still is always a nice feature for when discs on the market catch up to the newest drive specs.

The drives come with "Burn Protection" which means that if your computer is struggling to get the data for the CD fast enough it can slow down and speed up as nesecarry which many older and inferior drives could not do - you'd just end up with errors on your CD - but not with the Lite On!

I've burnt dozens of different brands of discs at a variety of speeds, and not had a single error. Even audio CDs, which are the places where errors show up the most with pops and clicks on the tracks are perfect at any speed! Definately a worthwhile investment for the future, and you'll never need to buy another CD Writer again!

The unit works great. I have used it to burn over 300 cd's in just over 3 months and have never seen the dreaded "buffer underrun" in nero 6 or had a wasted disc! Very impressed although I am finding it hard to buy packs of 52x CD-R's at the minute and have been forced to buy 48X discs instead. I have two lite-on drives, this and a 16x dvd-rom both on the same IDE channel (CDRW Master, DVD-ROM Slave) And I have had no problems using the drive in this way. I burn from both my DVD rom drive and my ATA-100 Hard Drive and still haven't had to throw a disc in the bin because of an error. Highly recommended, don't be put off just because It isnt a big name drive such as Plextor or Sony.

This drive has impressed me so much - I put a 2nd unit in the daughters PC.

I took out the HP CD-R/RW drive which cost a £160 and put in the Lite-on and the speed of installation is about 3 minutes.

This about 1 minute longer than it takes to make a backup copy of a CD. The HP took 15 minutes and not always successful - need a coaster -we have loads!

The Lite-on is actually faster than using 2 drives to copy.
Simply specify the Lite-on drive as the source and the writer. It will make a spooled drive image on the hard disc in about 60 seconds (at x32 to x48 read)and then spit the drawer out and asks for a Blank CD-R. It then takes another minute to burn an exact copy.

Using 2 drives (a 2nd x24 CD / DVD) drive takes about 10 minutes because the older 2nd drive takes so long to spool to the hard drive. Not worth the effort, just use the Lite-on and get your monies worth.

The drive comes bundled with Nero 6, vast ease-of-use improvement over Nero 5.5

I've used it with Roxio 6.2 as well on the other machine.
Both function, can't make my mind up which to use.
Roxio automatically detests and uses the Buffer under-run (Burn-proof) features, just like that.

Mt Rainier support too - soon all drives will be compatable with other this way.

Ohhh- I've never had a single CD-R toaster made yet
(error = ruined disc = toaster mat) ;-)