LG has put together what can easily be called the Swiss Army knife of DVD writers. While not the fastest DVD writer out there, LG's new "Super Multi" drive has few equals when it comes to flexibility. Supporting both the DVD Multi and DVD+ReWritable specifications, the GSA-4040B is the first drive with the ability to write to all major DVD formats, including DVD-RAM.

The GSA-4040B was designed from the ground up to read and write DVD's and that's what it does best. While drives with 8x DVD writing speeds have started to ship, the LG's 4x DVD+R and DVD-R writing speeds should fill the needs of most. As it is, the drive had no problems burning 4GB of data in less than 14 minutes.  The GSA-4040B also performed fairly well with DVD-RW and DVD-RAM media, but was no match for the Sony and its 4x DVD+RW writing speeds. We weren't able to verify this in our tests, but a number of people have reported compatibility problems with some 4x DVD-R media. Just keep this in mind if you purchase this drive.