Lite-On LH-20A1S DVD Burner Mini Review

The Lite-On LH-20A1S is a so-called Multi drive, meaning it also supports the DVD-RAM format.

This drive is one of few drives that also supports the DVD-RAM format, lets us look at the recording side of the disc, and as you can see it has differences from the other DVD+R/W/R9 DL and DVD-R/W discs.

We can see a very fascinating pattern of darker spots. These tick marks are "address information" ("Pre-mastered Pit Header Field") which are embedded onto the disc. This is header information in front of data sector area, and is the same format as HDD and MO.

A DVD-RAM’s disc can be formatted in the following formats:

·         FAT32

·         UDF 1.02

·         UDF 1.50

·         UDF 2.00

·         UDF 2.01

·         UDF 2.50

By formatting a DVD-RAM disc with FAT32 it will act like a removable hard drive and all writing will be done as “background processes”. Meaning you do not have to wait for it to finish, you can start or work with other applications while the DVD-RAM is working without noticing any “hangs” or CPU slowdowns.

DVD-RAM has error correction, but also has error replacement to spare sectors as a "defect management" function. This gives higher reliability than other DVD format.

Another advantage with DVD-RAM is that the discs can be formatted/erased/written at over 100.000 times before it will/can cause/report any errors. Let’s try to read back the 2 discs that we wrote:

Lets us take a look at the media we are going to use in these tests.

Maxell 12x rated DVD-RAM media

The Lite-On LH-20A1S wrote our 12x disc in 6 minutes and 25 seconds. Now let’s try and read the disc back in the drive.

The Lite-On LH-20A1S failed to read the burned disc.

We then tried to read back the disc on our Optiarc drive. The disc was readable but the Optiarc drive also had problems reading the disc and we were forced to write the disc again in the Optiarc drive to recover the disc.

Summary:

We would conclude the DVD-RAM writing quality with 12x DVD-RAM media with the Lite-On LH-20A1S needs improving.

This concludes our Lite-On LH-20A1S review. To read the conclusion, click on the link below….