Reading performance:

For these tests we will use Nero CD-DVD Speed to read various CD and DVD’s, including audio discs and DVD-media.

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing Hercules Radeon 9200 install software that is just over 75 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

The Lite-On LH-20A1H reached 47.74x read speed. Let’s compare it with some other drives below.

The Lite-On LH-20A1H was the fastest drive at reading our test CD-ROM. Access and seek times were also pretty good.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test, we made a copy of the original Hercules Radeon 9200 install CD. The disc we used was a Verbatim 52X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Taiyo Yuden.

The Lite-On LH-20A1H reached 48.11x read speed. Let’s compare it with some other drives below.

Again, the Lite-On LH-20A1H was among the fastest drives. This time with our CD-R test disc, the seek times are very good too.

CD-Rewritable discs:

Again, we made a copy of the original Hercules Radeon 9200 install CD; this time we used a Verbatim Ultra Speed+ (32X) CD-RW disc made by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

The drive is locked around 32x while reading CD-RWs. Let’s compare it with some other drives below.

The Lite-On LH-20A1H was the slowest drive when reading CD-RW media.

100 minutes CD:

We used Nero CD-DVD Speed to measure the transfer rate. The 100 min disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it is 99 minutes and 57 seconds long.

Audio – Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Lite-On LH-20A1H, again we used Nero CD/DVD-Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is about 77 minutes in length (77:07:10 min).

The Lite-On LH-20A1H reached 48.73x when reading our test audio disc. Let’s compare it with some drives below.

The Lite-On LH-20A1H was one of the fastest drives when reading our audio test CD.

Audio Extraction:

For this test we used EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to test the drive’s Audio extraction performance. As we can see from the screenshot below, the drive supports accurate stream and C2 error info and caching.

Below are the results produced by EAC:

The Lite-On LH-20A1H performed excellent in burst mode but was much slower in secure mode.

Advanced audio – DAE quality test:

Before we move on to testing DVD read speeds, we will take a last audio test, and this time we used the “Advanced DAE Quality Test” feature in CD-Speed. For this test we used a Sony CD-R DA media, manufactured by Taiyo Yuden.

The digital audio extracting quality is excellent and the drive is reported to support all advanced features.

DVD reading performance:

Again, we will use Nero CD-DVD Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 16X.

DVD – DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with a single and dual layered DVD video discs. While only 1X speed is required to watch DVD movies, it’s useful to be able to read the discs at higher speeds if you’re going to extract (rip) the content of the disc to your hard drive.

DVD-Video Single Layer

DVD-Video Double Layer (OTP)

As we can see, it reads DVD-Video Single layer at 16x and DVD-Video Double layer at 12x.

The Lite-On LH-20A1H performed very well in these tests.

DVD – DVD+R/RW:

For this test, we used one DVD+R and one DVD+RW with about 4.4Gb of data. Below are the results:

 DVD+R:

DVD+RW:

Again, the Lite-On LH-20A1H performed excellent in our DVD+R/+RW read tests. It was the fastest drive when reading DVD+R and about average when reading DVD+RW media.

DVD – DVD-R/RW:

For this test, we used one DVD-R disc and one DVD-RW disc filled with about 4.4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:  

DVD-R:

DVD-RW:

There are hardly any differences in the speed, compared to reading the DVD+R/RW discs.

The Lite-On LH-20A1H performed excellent when reading our DVD-R/RW test discs.

DVD – DVD+R DL:

For this test, we used one DVD+R DL disc and the result can be found below:

The Lite-On LH-20A1H reads DVD+R DL media with up to 12x speed.

DVD – DVD-R DL:

For this test, we used one DVD-R DL disc and the result can be found below:

The Lite-On LH-20A1H reads DVD-R DL media with up to 12x speed.

Summary:

The Lite-On LH-20A1H proved to be an excellent and very fast reader with no problems reading all our test discs.

Now let’s head over to the next page where we will test CD-R/RW writing performance……

Features:

CD-R/RW Writing Performance: