I've never liked combo drives, and I've never liked Memorex CD-RW - with a 10-pack of 4-10x media that neither of my other drives will touch.
But I digress... I wanted a new DVD-ROM to take the strain off my DVD writer, as my old DVD-ROM drive (never a great reader) recently gave up altogether, at least on DVD.
So off to the local computer fair, and the guy has on the table, a Sony DVD-ROM, and at only a couple of pounds more, this combo drive.
I've read the reviews, I know this is a Liteon rebrand, and I know it can do Mount Rainier mode on CD-RW, and I know it's also a great drive if you ever need to do protected backups.
Installed , and noted the old NYK1 firmware - have to upodate that, if I dont crossflash it to the more often updated Liteon firmware (no stupid "Turbo" fiddling either).
Not expecting much, I threw in this Memorex CD-RW that my other drives didn't even recognise as a blank.
It recognised it as CMC Magnetics (using Cdspeed 3.42).
So I selected "Create Data disk" (the latest CDspeed also records the write profile to the media, and recalls it in later testing - I'd recommend burning off a sample of any non-rewriteable as well, if you aren't sure how well your drive writes it, though it does mean wasting a blank if it's not rewriteable).
It wrote at 12x - so I didn't expect much.
I then scanned it (in Cdspeed) - and the scan was quite good ... I've seen better results on CD-R, but never on CD-RW, and not only was the C1 scan good (a few peaks to 15 or so), but the speed went smoothly to max and the error rate didn't increase.
This is the best drive Liteon ever made!
But I digress... I wanted a new DVD-ROM to take the strain off my DVD writer, as my old DVD-ROM drive (never a great reader) recently gave up altogether, at least on DVD.
So off to the local computer fair, and the guy has on the table, a Sony DVD-ROM, and at only a couple of pounds more, this combo drive.
I've read the reviews, I know this is a Liteon rebrand, and I know it can do Mount Rainier mode on CD-RW, and I know it's also a great drive if you ever need to do protected backups.
Installed , and noted the old NYK1 firmware - have to upodate that, if I dont crossflash it to the more often updated Liteon firmware (no stupid "Turbo" fiddling either).
Not expecting much, I threw in this Memorex CD-RW that my other drives didn't even recognise as a blank.
It recognised it as CMC Magnetics (using Cdspeed 3.42).
So I selected "Create Data disk" (the latest CDspeed also records the write profile to the media, and recalls it in later testing - I'd recommend burning off a sample of any non-rewriteable as well, if you aren't sure how well your drive writes it, though it does mean wasting a blank if it's not rewriteable).
It wrote at 12x - so I didn't expect much.
I then scanned it (in Cdspeed) - and the scan was quite good ... I've seen better results on CD-R, but never on CD-RW, and not only was the C1 scan good (a few peaks to 15 or so), but the speed went smoothly to max and the error rate didn't increase.
This is the best drive Liteon ever made!