detail information

What's inside the box?

On this page we will take a look at what the drive came shipped with and take a look at the drive and it's techniques.

Here is the box that contains the drive:

The box is made in a shiny black colour with a nice and clean layout. The box is a bit larger than most boxes containing optical drives, it also appears to be very solid. All in all the entire box gives quite a quality feeling.

But a nice box is not enough, there have to be something inside it, so we opened the box and took out the content of it:

As we could see the package is very complete, to be sure that nothing is left out we list the content of the box below:

Box content:

⋅         The drive itself
⋅         Owners manual
⋅         Declaration of conformity papers
⋅         Some warranty papers
⋅         A quick guide on how to use the included programs
⋅         IDE Cable
⋅         Audio Cable
⋅         4 screws
⋅         Software CD containing:
⋅         BHA Gold5 Writing software
⋅         BHA Clip packet writing software
⋅         NeoDVD DVD-movie creation program
⋅         DVD-RAM driver
⋅         Acrobat reader
⋅         PowerDVD DVD Video player installation CD.
⋅         One Maxell DVD-RAM disc

A very impressive retail package, we can't find anything that we are missing, although a better manual would be preferred as the one included only contains the most basic things to get you started.

Now it's time to take a look at the drive itself:

Again one of the new designed fronts without headphone connector and volume knob. We are still not totally used to this and feels that the drive gets a bit naked and boring without it. Beside that the drive is pretty good and exclusive looking. The LED (Light Emitting Diode) is quite small compared to many other drives, not that it causes any problems as it is visible enough.

As we could see out from the sticker on the drive, our drive was manufactured in July 2003 at a factory in Korea. The model number is also clearly visible.

On the back of the drive there is the usual connectors, from the left there is: digital audio connector, analogue audio connector, pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master, IDE connector and power connector.

The length and weight of this drive is about average for a DVD-Writer.

We quickly installed the drive without any problems and fired up Nero Info Tool to get an idea of which features this drive supports:

While the drive came shipped with firmware A104 we immediately updated the drive to the latest version available, version A301. It's getting closer to the day where we would find a drive with all checkboxes checked, but to bad this drive do not support Mount Rainier and reading CD+G discs. We do also feel that a buffer size of only 2Mb is quite small for a DVD-Writer and a larger buffer would have been nice

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM:

We do not really find anything alarming here either, but a larger buffer and Mount Rainier support would have been nice.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the write technology used by the LG GSA-4040B:

CD-Recordable:

The drive uses Zone-CLV(Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) to write at its maximum speed of 24X. The drive uses four zones to reach 24X; it starts out at a rather low speed of 12X, climbs to 16X, then to 20X and finally at the 46-minute mark it jumps to it's rated speed of 24X. This gives a rather low average speed of only 19,23X.

CD-ReWritable:

As we could see the drive uses Zone-CLV(Zone-Constant Linear Velocity) to write at its rated speed of 16X for Ultra speed CD-RW, Since there is only 2 zones, one at 12X and one at 16X the impact on the write speed is not that dramatic and the average write speed is 15,23X.

Included software:

Now it's time to look at the included software, and comment it if needed. Notice that we may not use the included software in our performance testing part of the review.

PowerDVD:

The drive includes Cyberlink's PowerDVD Media player to play DVD and VCD movies. PowerDVD is a good and widely used software DVD-player, so LG have done a wise choice when selecting to include PowerDVD with the drive.

We quickly installed all the included programs found on the application CD. Here is a snapshot from the installation menu on the application CD:

We have not used any of these programs before (except acrobat reader of course), but this does not mean that they are bad programs. J

B's recorder GOLD 5:

B's recorder GOLD 5 is the basic writing program included with this drive, to get an idea of which features this program supports we started it up:

Here we found the most used disc profiles and selecting one of them brought us to a CD-Creation wizard that was pretty easy to follow. But to give an idea of how the program looks when not using the wizard we closed the wizard:

We did not have any problems understanding how to use the program. We did also look at the options to see if there is any advanced hidden features:

In the drive options we found some useful settings. The 'Emphasize the reading compatibility" option is quite useful if you have a DVD drive that won't play the disc just because it is a DVD+R/RW disc, by enabling this option and having a drive that supports it - the disc won't be recognized as a DVD+R/RW by the player and be able to play. The latter option is quite useful as well if you have a ruined DVD+RW disc that can't be detected anymore, notice that this will destroy all the data that is on the disc. We also wrote a few discs with the program without any problems:

We feel that picking B's recorder GOLD 5 is not a bad choice as we got used to the program quite fast and did not encounter any problems while using it.

Included with B's recorder GOLD there is also a small audio player:

While pretty simple and without any fancy features it does the job and supports showing CD-TEXT for discs with CD-TEXT, unlike Winamp that do not show CD-TEXT.

B's CLIP:

B's CLIP is the packet-writing program of BHA. If you have used InCD you'll get used to this program pretty quick as well as it's basically the same layout:

We do not have any complaints here as the program is very easy to use, and looks almost identical to Ahead's InCD.

Included with B's Clip there is also a small utility to erase CD-RW and DVD RW discs:

Mediostream NeoDVD:

Mediostream's NeoDVD allows you to easily create your own DVD-movies out of your private movie files. We had no problems setting up a quick compilation ready to be written to the disc, it took us below 5 minutes to create this, so by using 5 minutes more the result could be quite good:

The program does the job it's meant for; creating DVD-Videos out of your private movie clips and thus we have nothing to complain about.

DVD-RAM driver:

The DVD-RAM drives is included to ease the use of DVD-RAM discs and contains two different small utilities:

The first is DVDForm to format the DVD-RAM disc; the disc may be formatted into UDF 1.5 and UDF 2.0 as well as FAT32! It's nice to have different options.

The seconds is Wptool to write protect the DVD-RAM disc, quite handy if you are worried about your kids 'accidentally" formatting/deleting data from your DVD-RAM disc.

All in all the software collection is quite complete and features most programs that could be useful in combination with your newly bought Super multi DVD-Writer.

Now that we have finished examining the drive bundle it's time to head on to next page, which is reading performance test…