We have rarely had a drive looking so good on the paper and still failing so completely to impress us. The reading and writing quality of this drive is in many cases just not good enough. It does have its benefits by supporting the DVD-RAM format that is fine for backup purposes, but else to slow. Also the retail package is pretty complete and the documentation is good. It do support 'Correct EFM encoding" allowing it to make backups of safedisc protected discs without much trouble, but you should use another reader to read the image as the reading quality of the LG GSA-4040B is so bad that it creates more read errors than there should be. Another fine thing is that it supports reading all protected audio discs, again the bad thing is that according to the CD-speed advanced audio test, the drive is so bad at extracting audio that you don't know if the music is extracted correctly. Another advantage is that it supports 24X CD-R writing compared to 16X CD-R writing of many other drives, which is actually not as fast as you think since it starts at 12X writing and uses Zone-CLV technology to reach 24X. And if this was not enough the drive do not support writing all discs at 24X either, and some it writes with very low quality. This disappoints us pretty much, could it be that difficult to write all discs at 24X with good quality? After all the discs is 48/52X certified and works with few problems at 40X or higher in normal CD-Writers.

But how is it for DVD-Writing then? Well it wrote all 4X DVD+R discs at 4X without problems, but according to our quality tests the writing quality is questionable with some discs, including discs from known quality manufacturers such as Taiyo Yuden and Ricoh. Maybe it's better for DVD-R? It depends on how you look at it, it did write all discs without problems but do not expect that all 4X discs will work at 4X; most cheaper ones do only work at 2X. Write quality with DVD-R was in most cases good enough, since many DVD-R discs are of very low quality we expected some discs to show some problems.