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 12X for DVD's and 40X 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 40X, below is a comparison table with other drives:

The drive has some really nice seek times, but speed-wise it ends up a bit behind the other drives.

CD-Recordable Discs:

For this test we made a copy of the original PlexTools v1.08 CD. The disc we used was a Verbatim 48X certified CD-R disc manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation.

Nothing changes here, and the result is about identical to reading the pressed disc. The usual comparison table is found below.

Again it's among the slower drives, but the seek times are still acceptable.

CD-ReWritable discs:

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

The drive reads CD-RW discs at 32x, to see how this compares to other drives; look below:

It's not able to keep up with the fastest drives due to the 32x reading speed limit.

Audio - Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Lite-On SOHW-812S, 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 (77:56:57).

The drive had no problems with reading the audio disc at full speed and everything seems good, so let us compare the result with other drives:

It came out as the slowest drive except for the NEC ND-2500A that reads audio discs at 32x only. The difference is not large though.

Below is the results produced by EAC:

Burst mode

Secure mode

The drive performed very well in the burst mode test, but only around average in the secure test.

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 extracting quality should be very good, and it should support everything. Very good, gets a plus in our book.

DVD reading performance:

Again we will use Nero CD-Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 12X.

DVD - DVD-Video:

For our DVD reading performance tests we are going to start with 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.

As we can see, this drive does not have a speed limit when reading DVD-Video discs. The single layer disc was read at full 12x speed and the dual layer disc was read at 8x.

*Notice that the disc contains a bit less data than the disc used with the other drives, this is because the other larger discs we had is made with DVD-ROM booktype and this may affect the reading performance, and thus we have switched over to this disc with DVD-Video booktype.

The Lite-On SOHW-812S is among the fastest drives for reading DVD-Discs and it does not have any speed locks for reading DVD-Video discs either. Another plus in our book.

DVD - DVD+R(W):

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD+R and a Ricoh 4X DVD+RW with about 4,4Gb of data. Below are the results:

The reading speed was locked to 8x for both DVD+R and DVD+RW, look below for comparison results.

The drive did very good, and the difference between this drive and other drives is not large.

DVD - DVD-R/RW:

For this test we used a Taiyo Yuden 4X DVD-R disc and a Verbatim 2X DVD-RW disc filled with about 4,4Gb of data. Our test results are found below:

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

The drive is again right up there among the faster drives.

Overall thoughts:

The reading speed is just as good as expected, and it's only for reading CD-RW discs that it lacks noticeably behind the other drives. One benefit with this drive is that i do not have a speed limit for reading DVD-Video discs, unlike most other drives.

Overall it gets a plus in our book for good reading performance and low seek times.

But now it's time to head on to a more interesting part: Writing CD-R discs…