detail information

A note on test disc sizes: The sizes of the test discs burned vary a bit, because the drive had a tendency to slow down when overburning at 52x, which costs lot of time (several seconds) and thus does not show the true performance. The difference between 80mins and 80min:30sec would be 0.6 seconds in burning time, so that the results are still very well comparable.

The drive also takes slightly varying amount of time for Laser Power Calibration, so that writing exactly the same image several times can lead to differences of several seconds.

CD Recordable

For 52x CD-R writing, the drive uses the CAV method. As you can see, the disc spins at 11.000 - 12.000 rpm:

For 48x CD-R writing, CAV is used as well. Note that the drive reaches a speed of 49x actually. The disc spins at "only" 10.000-11.000 rpm now:

For 40x CD-R writing, the drive uses the P-CAV method. At this speed, the disc spins at not more than 9.500 rpm:

CD ReWriteable (High-Speed)

For re-writing at 12x speed, CLV is used: High-Speed CD-RW media has been designed for recording speeds of 4x-10x. However, most CD writers can do 12x speed on these media:

CD ReWriteable (Ultra-Speed)

To increase re-write speed, it was necessary to invent a new kind of discs, and these discs are called ltra-Speed CD-RWs. Your writer must be certified for using ultra-speed CD-RW discs, otherwise it won't be able to write them (not even at 10x speed!). Remember, it's the same with high-speed media: Recorders which can do 4x rewriting, but which are not certified for high-speed media, cannot write to 4x-10x High-speed media, not even at 4x. Now, the same applies to ultra-speed media.

Important Note: When writing the bundled Ultraspeed-media (ATIP: Plasmon) at 24x speed, it turned out unreadable! The same happened when writing this disc in a Plextor 48/24x drive! Writing at 16x, however, resulted in a readable disc.

A Mitsubishi disc gave better results at 24x; it did not even show any C2 errors (yellow areas in Nero CD Seed scan), so you should try to get these if you want to rewrite at 24x speed. For rewriting at 24x speed, CAV is used, resulting in an average speed of 18x:

For rewriting at 16x speed, CLV is used, so that 16x is actually only little slower than 24x:

Here are all values summerized in a table:

CD-Recordable	CD-R 52x	CD-R 48x	CD-R 40x
CD-Rewriteable (High-Speed)	CD-RW 12x	CD-RW 10x
CD-Rewriteable (Ultra-Speed)	CD-RW 24x	CD-RW 16x	CD-RW 10x

When writing CD-R media at 48x and 52x the LiteOn drive uses the full CAV (not P-CAV) write method and you can see that writing starts at 23x and ends at 52x, with an average of 39.4x. This is of course faster than the LiteOn 48x or Plextor 48x drives, as expected.

When writing at 40x, the drive started only at 18.5x, instead of 23x. Thus, the speed at 40x is the same as for the LiteOn LTR-48125W and LTR-40125W: 31.4x. This way, 40x writing is not as fast as possible, but it allows you to use media which would not sustain 12.000 rpm.

For rewriting at 24x speed, the LTR-52246S uses CAV mode as well, thus having only 18x average. As a comparision, the Plextor PX-W4824A achieves more than 23x using P-CAV, as well as the Yamaha CRW-F1. Rewriting at 16x is done in CLV mode.

CD Recordable

For writing at 52x speed, I've used Nero Burning Rom and TDK Reflex Ultra 32x media, which is good for 52x recording.

As you can see, the complete task of writing 80:24 has been completed within 2 minutes and 32 seconds. Now, let's check the write times when we use 48x recording:

You can see, 52x is 8 seconds faster than 48x...

CD Rewriteable (Ultra-Speed)

It takes 4 minutes and 55 seconds to write a full 652 MB to an ultra-speed CD-RW disc at 24x speed (remember that it is CAV mode). Unfortunately, 700 MB ultra-speed media does not seem to be available. Rewriting at 24x could be much faster (less than 4 minutes), if P-CAV would be used, instead of CAV. Writing the same disc at 16x shows the following result:

Which is, after looking at the CD-Speed results, not surprising: the difference between 16x CLV and 24x CAV is only 13 seconds.

Performance with CloneCD

The media used is TDK Reflex Ultra 32x. Since the drive did a slowdown at the end when trying to overburn, I set up a 79:52 image and burned this one. As already explained, the difference to 80:25, which was used in the Nero test, would be about half a second, assuming that no slowdown occurs. For an unknown reason, the drive did this slowdown when trying to use the same disc as for the tests with Nero, so that I was forced not to overburn to get proper results with CloneCD. The problem might be that I've used 32x certified media for writing at 52x though.

It took not more than 2 minutes and 20 seconds to write 703 MB!

Something you should know...

There seems to be a very weird issue. It appearently concerns especially Mitsubishi 4x-10x Highspeed CD-RW media, 650 MB as well as 700 MB media. When writing these media at 10x in DAO mode, sometimes the last 2 sectors were bad, just as if the disc had been written in TAO mode (which definitely was not the case). When using 12x speed on these discs, this happen randomly on a few sectors at a random location on the disc.

When writing in DAO/96 mode, the issue vanished. This could mean that bad subchannel has been created by the writer. This bug has been reported by a few more people using different LiteOn writers, not only on CD-RW media, but also on CD-R.

I thus recommend you to use RAW96P/RAW96R mode, or whatever this mode is called in your prefered recording software (this could be DAO/96, RAW-DAO-96, RAW-PW, DAO-PW), in order to avoid trouble.

Next we'll be finding out something about the write quality the drive achieves at its high speed...

Scratched/Low Quality Disc

Write Quality