detail information

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. As already mentioned in the introduction this drive sports a specified read speed of 16X for DVD's and 48X for CD's. 

Pressed discs:

For this test we used a pressed CD-ROM disc containing PlexTools v1.08 that is exactly 74 minutes long. Below you will see the produced result:

The drive reached its rated speed of 48X at the end of the disc with an average speed of 36,95X. How this compares to other 48X readers you may see in the table below:

Compared to the two other drives it's on par with the TEAC CD-W540 for reading and fits in between the Plextor PX-W4824TA and the TEAC CD-W540 for seek times, we can't complain as it reached it's rated speeds and seek times.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 CD. The disc we used was a Plextor 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Taiyo Yuden.

The reading speed for the CD-R disc backup is about the same as for the original with an average speed of 36,93X, again we presents an comparison table below:

Nothing changes here, it's still between the two other drives for seek times, but marginally faster that the TEAC CD-W540E for reading.

CD-ReWritable discs:

Again we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 disc, this time we used a plextor High Speed (10X) CD-RW disc made by Ricoh.

But for CD-RW discs the drive is locked at 40X reading and reached an average speed of 31.31X. Look below for a comparison table with two other 48X readers:

Again the seek times is between the other two drives, but the drive got outperformed by the other drives, the TEAC CD-W540E is beating it with a large margin since it's not limited to 40X reading for CD-RW discs.

Audio '? Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Lite-On LTC-48161H we again used Nero CD/DVD-Speed to measure the transfer rate. The audio disc we used is slightly larger than the disc used for the other tests, to be exact it's about 78 minutes long (77:56:58).

The drive supports reading audio at full 48X speed, and is topping out at a whopping 49,58X with an average speed of 37,61X. Below there's a comparison table:

This time it ends up as the slowest drives when it comes to seek times, but the seek times is still very good. But since the other two drives is locked at 40X for reading music it beats them with a long shot at raw transfer speed.

And as a last test we used Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to extract the audio to our hard drive. According to EAC the Lite-On LTC-48161H supports caching and accurate stream, as well as reporting C2 errors correctly.

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed as expected in the burst mode test and reached a top speed of 49,9X. But for the secure mode test it was only able to read at an average speed of 11,7X. Compared to other drives this is quite good:

Advanced audio '? DAE quality test:

Before we move on to testing DVD read speeds we will take a last audio test, this time we used the 'Advanced DAE Quality Test" feature in CD-Speed.

The Lite-On LTC-48161H is able to do on the fly copying at speeds up to 16X and probably more as well. It supports reading subchannel data and CD-Text as well as reading data from the lead in and lead-out. The drive is also good at reading audio since it reached a perfect score of 100.0

DVD reading performance:

Again we will use Nero CD-Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs.

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. Notice: Even if these discs contains DVD-Video they are identified as DVD-ROM discs for a reason or another, it's a disc issue and not a drive issue, we did several tests and this do not seem to affect the results of the tests in any way.

The drive was able to perform better than it's specified for and actually passed the 16X mark for the Single layer disc. The dual layer disc was read at 8X Max speed.

It's very fast for reading the single layer DVD discs but is beaten by the Asus for the Dual-layer test. The Toshiba failed to recognize more than one layer of the disc and then can't be compared.

DVD '? DVD+R(W):

For this test we used an Arita 4X DVD+R and a Memorex 2.4X DVD+RW with about 4,4Gb of data. Below are the results:

While the drive did not read the discs at full speed it did read them without any problems. Let us compare the result with other drives and see how it compares to those:

For a reason or another the Toshiba SD-M1502 is able to read DVD+R/RW discs at almost full speed and thus beating the other two drives. The Lite-On LTC-48161H beat the Asus on reading the DVD+RW disc though.

DVD '? DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a Princo 4X DVD-R disc and a Ritek 1X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4,4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

As we could see out from these graphs, the drive performed nearly the same with DVD-R/RW discs as with DVD+R/RW discs. Below is a comparison table:

This time the Toshiba fell behind the other two drives. For the DVD-R disc the Asus is the winner, but for the DVD-RW disc the Lite-On is the winner.

But now it's time to head on to the most interesting part: Writing CD and DVD discs…

Features and bundle

Writing Performance