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| Liteon 160P6S DVD-R/W Review |
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Page 4 of 6
Test Configuration and CD Tests
Since we don't have a 1/2 dozen new model burners in the testing lab, we're not doing this as a head-to-head test. Also, though I'll comment on burn speeds relative to my experience, burn speeds won't be the end-all for passing judgment. Being able to handle good and bad media (and the quality of different media brands and type can vary quite widely), and being able to produce burns that can reliably be read on other drives are quite honestly far more important concerns than winning a speed test by 11 seconds. Real world concerns are just more important than who wins the race.
So, with that in mind, let's begin. The drive was
installed and tested on the following ancient and somewhat laughable system:
The following Software was used during tests:
One Important consideration with DVD burners is firmware. This drive shipped with a revision PS09 firmware which is a tad old. Understandable of course, since the drive was manufactured quite some time ago. Firmware updates often bring with them better write strategies and improved media support, so it's always wise to get the latest one for a DVD burner. With that in mind, I visited Liteon's website and obtained the latest PS0B revision firmware and updated the drive, a simple process which is done entirely in Windows, so don't freak out. First up, a quick test of the drive's CD burning capabilities. The drive supports 48x CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) for CD-R, and 24x Z-CLV (Zoned Constant Linear Velocity) for CD-RW. I don't know about you, but I've not bought more than a handful of RW discs *EVER*, so I'm going to be mean and just not worry about RW.   The first thing I did was load a 48x rated Maxell CD-R Pro 700mb blank CD-R disc (Taiyo Yuden dye), and create a DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) Test disc 74 minutes in length. Running Nero's Benchmark on the disc, things are good and what I expected to see. The drive starts out reading at 21.74x speeds and ends with a 48.70x speed, which is a good ending read speed considering I only created a 74mb disc instead of an 80mb one. The reported random access time is in line with the manufacturer’s claims and the 1/3rd and full stroke times are also rather good. CPU usage from 1x-8x read speeds is pleasantly low, and the drive reports a respectable 28MB/sec burst rate. DAE Extraction quality was rated a 10, and you can’t really get any better than that. Nothing earth shatteringly amazing, but with burners you don't really want too many surprises, at least not any of the bad variety.  
Running the CD quality tests, you do see a few C1 errors with more concentrated towards the end of the disc though none of them are out of the ordinary and no C2 errors at all. The disc itself gets a 99% rating in the quality test. Nothing earth shattering here, but that's a good thing. At this point in the grand scheme of burning, quality CD burns should be a given, and I don’t see anything here to give me pause for concern.
Up next, the more important DVD burning tests. |
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