Liteon 8X DVD/CD dual writer

This is the fastest IDE DVD writer we’ve reviewed so far. It reads DVDs at 12X and records on DVD+R media and DVD-R at 8X and 4X respectively. It re-writes DVD+RW at 4X and DVD-RW at 2X. Also it writes CDs at 40X and CDRWs at 24X. 

We did all the DVD writing tests on 4X DVD-R and +R as 8X DVD wasn’t available in the market. We burnt 4.3 GB data on DVD+R media at 4X that took 14 mins 44 secs, which is quite good. We then ran the same test on the same 4X media, but at 8X, and it took just 9 mins 21 secs. Though, this may not always work, since you’re burning at a faster rate than the media is rated at. In our case, it burnt without any problems. Surprisingly, it only took 33 secs to format a DVD+RW in CD-6 and 24 mins to copy 4.3 GB of data on it, both are very good timings. 

Coming to the CD tests, the drive took 3 mins to burn 650 MB of data on 48X CD-R and same time to create an audio CD from 74 mins of audio. It took 3 mins to do CD duplication and 6 mins for audio CD duplication. 

The drive comes with PowerDVD and SONIC MyDVD software. Overall it’s a very good buy, considering the speed. 

Sanjay Majumder