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 its techniques.

Here is the box that contains the drive:

At least there is no doubt about the manufacturer of this drive when you look at the box. The main specifications are also clearly visible.

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 pretty complete, to be sure that nothing is left out we list the content of the box below:

Box content:

⋅         The drive itself
⋅         Quick install guide
⋅         Small safety notice paper.
⋅         A 'Thanks for buying this drive" paper.
⋅         Audio Cable
⋅         4 screws
⋅         Sonic Software CD with: MyDVD, RecordNow DX and DLA (packet writing).
⋅         PowerDVD DVD Video player installation CD.
⋅         One empty 4X DVD+R disc (Made by ricoh).
⋅         One empty 4X DVD+RW disc (made by ricoh).

This is really an impressive bundle with empty media as well as all programs you could possibly need. The only things missing is IDE cable and a printed manual.

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

The front is physically identical to the front of the Lite-On LTC-48161H Combo drive we reviewed not long ago. A pretty plain and clean looking front, there is not more to say really.

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

On the back of the drive there is the usual connections, from the left there is: six pins used transfer individual calibration data to the drive at the factory, 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 newer manufactured Lite-On drives are the shortest drives we have ever seen. The old Lite-On drive to the left is short compared to many other drives so the new Lite-On drive to the right is very short compared to all other drives we have seen. Nice for small cases, probably saves some cost during manufacturing as well.

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

Our drive came shipped with firmware FS02. We had some initial problems with the drive and waited for a new firmware to fix the problems. And finally firmware FS0F that we use in this review arrived and cured most problems. As most other manufacturers Lite-On choose to equip their drive with 2Mb buffer that we feel is a bit small. This drive supports everything except Mt. Rainier and DVD-RAM reading/writing.

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 Lite-On LDW-411S:

CD-Recordable:

The drive uses CAV(Constant Angular Velocity) to write at its maximum speed of 40X. The drive reached 41.80X at the end and this gives an average speed of 31.77x. Very few drives in the same generation as the Lite-On is able to deliver the same write speed for CD-R discs.

CD-ReWritable:

As we could see the drive uses P-CAV(Partial-Constant Angualar Velocity) write method to write at its rated speed of 24X for Ultra speed CD-RW, this easily makes it one of the fastest drives for CD-RW writing in its class with an average speed of 23.52X.

Features and techniques:

Now it's time to take a look at the features and techniques of this drive:

SMART-BURN is Lite-on's coaster prevention system, it contains the buffer under run protection as well as a media database and measuring system to select the best write speed and strategy for every CD-R and DVDR disc.

SMART-X is a technology, which will make the drive read music and VCD discs at low speeds when only slow streams of data is required (for example when playing the disc) and faster speeds when required (for example when extracting the content of the disc).

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 Lite-On has done a wise choice when selecting to include PowerDVD with the drive.

The PowerDVD installation CD also contains various user manuals, including manual for LDW-401S (DVD+R/RW), but no manual for the LDW-411S (DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW). But mostly the LDW-401S manual could be used as there is very little media specific information in it. It's a pretty short and simple manual, only covering the most important things. A better manual would be preferred.

Sonic MyDVD 4.5:

This is the opening window of Sonic MyDVD.

And this is the creation window.

Sonic MyDVD is one of the easier programs we have used when it comes to creating VCD and DVD movies. Although we have not used the program very long it seems like Lite-On made a good choice on including Sonic MyDVD.

But what about general CD/DVD-Writing and packet writing?

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