detail information

Lite-On IT was kind enough to send us their latest 8x dual format DVD-Writer; the Lite-On SOHW-812S. We have pretty good knowledge with Lite-On drives, as we have reviewed several of their drives earlier. Lite-On IT is one of the main players in the optical market; Lite-On IT is actually just one part of the large Lite-On Company. The Lite-On company produces a lot of different products: keyboards, power supplies and optical drives are just a few of them. But let us concentrate on the Lite-On IT as it's them we are dealing with.

Also thanks to Memorex for providing some of the media used in this review.

Some Lite-On history:

In 1995 Lite-On gathered some elite scientist and engineers from ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute) to start an optical storage research and manufacturing business in Taiwan. Currently they have over 130 engineers with Master & Ph. D. degrees in their Research & Development team, that are dedicated to the development of their patented anti-vibration mechanical design, advanced circuit design, firmware programming & performance tuning. The Research & Development team achievement is a key factor that has ensured their success in product development.

In 1997, Lite-On established a large manufacturing facility in China enabling them to provide optimum OEM/ODM support to all 1st-Tier PC makers, which further demonstrated their success in the worldwide Optical drive market. Today, they are among top-3 optical drive manufacturer worldwide, mostly due to attractive pricing and quality filled products, along with large OEM contracts. They have also received top brand name recognition in many regions. These achievements, plus superb management visions and planning, enabled them to continue their growth and profit even at times when the optical drive market experienced "price-wars" and many optical drive manufacturers were forced out.

In 1999, they created LITE-ON Information Technology Corporation, another proud member of the Lite-On Group, to concentrate on developing and manufacturing optical drives to stay strong in the storage business. They are going to carry on the tradition of developing optical drives to expand their research and manufacturing capacity to new generations of products such as DVD drives, High speed CD-RW drives and COMBO drives to stay strong in both the retail and OEM/ODM market.

At 9^th July 2001 Lite-On IT signed a co-operation contract with JVC, a famous Japanese electrical company, to be in alliance with each other. Two new companies was established, one is the optical drives manufacturing sales company, named as JVC LITE-ON IT Manufacturing & Sales, Limited (JLMS) , the other is pick-up head developing & manufacturing company.

JVC is a pioneer in development of key components of optical drives and consumer electronics as well, Lite-On IT is excellent in volume manufacturing and developing, also skilled in IT industry. That kind of strategic alliance would benefit both companies.

If you have read our previous Lite-On reviews you may already feel familiar with this company information, so let us now take a look at the specifications of this drive:

Drive specifications:

These are the specifications of this drive, found at the Lite-On's webpage:

Specification wise it seems to be a real winner and should outperform the latest drives from Pioneer and NEC - at least in some areas like CD-Writing.

The only drawbacks we could see are the lack of DVD-RAM reading support and the lack of Mt. Rainier support. A larger buffer would be nice as well.

Read on to see how the drive really performs, we will compare it to the latest drives from Pioneer and NEC among others.

Test machine:

For this review we will be using a computer with the following configuration:

Hardware:

⋅         Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8KNXP with Intel i875P chipset.
⋅         Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2,8GHz 800MHz FSB with Hyper Threading support.
⋅         RAM: 1Gb PC3500 DDR
⋅         GFX: ATI Radeon 9800 pro
⋅         Sound: SB Audigy 2
⋅         Hard disks: 2 x Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 160Gb S-ATA in RAID 0 on the i875P S-ATA RAID controller.

System set-up:

The Lite-On SOHW-812S was connected as Secondary Slave and identified itself as LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-812S. DMA (Direct Memory Access) and autorun was enabled for all devices.

Software:

Windows XP professional is installed on the computer along with Service Pack 1 for windows XP. We will be using the following software in this review:

⋅         Ahead InCD v 4.1.5.10
⋅         Ahead Nero Burning ROM version 6.3.1.6
⋅         Ahead Nero CD/DVD Speed v2.11.6
⋅         Ahead Nero InfoTool v2.07b
⋅         Slysoft CloneCD v4.3.2.2
⋅         Exact Audio Copy v0.95 prebeta 5
⋅         K-Probe v1.1.29

Head on to the next page and find out what's inside the box…