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.

The drive appeared at our place within a week after we requested the drive from Lite-On.
Kudos to Lite-On for fast shipping of the drive.

Here is the box that contains the drive:

The size of the box is smaller than earlier boxes we have got from Lite-On, probably saves materials and space when shipping the drives. The main speeds and features is 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
⋅         Safety notice paper
⋅         Sound Cable
⋅         4 screws
⋅         Nero writing software installation CD
⋅         PowerDVD DVD Video player installation CD.
⋅         One empty Lite-On 80 minutes CD-R disc made by Ritek.
⋅         One empty Lite-On 74 minutes Ultra speed CD-RW disc made by Plasmon Data systems.

A pretty good retail package, the only thing we are missing is an IDE cable and a printed manual.

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

The front looks like a combination of the old CD-RW drive front and a front of a Lite-On DVD-ROM. The front looks less boring than the old front, the front are beige and because of this fits nicely into every normal computer.

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

On the back of the drive there is no big changes, from the left there is: Some unknown pins, digital audio connector, analogue audio connector, pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master, IDE connector and power connector.

It's not only the box that's smaller; the drive is smaller as well. Notice that the Lite-On LTC-48161H to the right is a lot shorter than the older Lite-On drive to the left. This drive is ideal in small cases, as it won't take up much space in the case. This drive is the shortest drive we have ever seen from any manufacturer!

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 KH0F we immediately updated the drive to the latest version available; version KH0N. We can't find much to put our finger on out from the information found here, as the drive supports about everything, including Mount Rainier. If we should put our finger on something it will be the 2Mb buffer that could have been larger and the lack of the ability to read DVD-RAM discs.

And another shot from Nero Burning ROM:

We can't find anything bad here, but still a 2048Kb buffer is a bit small and may cause the buffer-underrun protection technology to kick in very often on stressed systems. It's possible to turn off the SMART-BURN technology as well and force the drive to write at 48X to all CD-R discs, this is not recommended as it may give reduced write quality and unreadable discs.

Now it's time to take a closer look at the write technology used by the Lite-On LTC-48161H:

CD-Recordable:

The drive uses CAV(Constant Angular Velocity) to write at it's rated speed of 48X, this gives an average speed of 37,40X

CD-ReWritable:

As we could see the drive uses CAV(Constant Angular Velocity) to write at it's rated speed of 24X for Ultra speed CD-RW, this gives an average speed of 18,57X. Compared to many other drives this is not so good since many other drives uses P-CAV(Partial-Constant Angular Velocity) there is even a few drives able to write CD-RW discs at 24X using CLV(Constant Linear Velocity) technology. Two examples is found below:

Plextor PX-708A uses P-CAV to reach 24X Ultra speed CD-RW speed, this gives a higher average speed of 23,75X

And the Optorite CW-5205 uses CLV write strategy for full 24X speed.

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.

When we inserted the PowerDVD installation disc, we got this autorun menu.

As you could see it's not only PowerDVD that is on this disc, the manual for the Combo drive is there as well. The manual is 20 pages long and contains a lot of useful information, although it's not the best manual we have seen it's far from the worst.

Cyberlinks PowerDVD is a good and widely used software DVD player.

When we inserted the Nero Express software installation CD, we got the following autorun menu:

The disc contains manuals for Lite-On CD-RW drives, acrobat reader and writing software from Ahead.

Nero express is quite good while we would prefer the full Nero burning ROM suite.

All in all the software collection is quite complete and features most programs that could be useful in combination with your newly bought Combo drive.

Features and techniques:

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

SMART-BURN is Lite-ons 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 disc. It's possible to switch off the media control feature of SMART-BURN in Nero and some other writing software, this will make the Lite-On write at the speed you select without caring about media quality, this is not recommended as it may give lowered write quality and unreadable discs.

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).

Mount Rainier:

In the Nero Burning Rom screenshot we saw that the Lite-On LTC-48161H supports the Mount Rainier format. Mount Rainier enables native operating system support of data storage on CD-ReWriteable discs. This makes the technology far easier to use and allows the replacement of the floppy. Key features include:

⋅         Defect management by the drive itself
⋅         Logical write-addressing at 2k
⋅         Background formatting
⋅         Command set implementation
⋅         Compatibility and standards-compliance

For more information you can visit www.mt-rainier.org.

That was the main features of the Lite-On LTC-48161H, now it's time to take a look at the reading performance of this drive….

Introduction

Reading Performance