Lite-On SHW-1635S review

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 16X for DVD’s and 48X 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 Lite-On SHW-1635S had no problems reaching 48x. To see how this compares to other drives, look below:

One of the faster readers we have tested, the seek times is about average compared to 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.

No big differences compared to reading the original pressed disc, but let us compare the result to some other drives:

It was able to beat all the other drives, but the difference is rather small. Seek times are again average compared to the other drives.

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 Lite-On SHW-1635S reads CD-RW discs at 32x speed only. Check how this compares to other drives below.

Among the slower drives due to the low reading speed, we would like to see an improvement on this. But the seek times is good, just slightly behind the best drives.

Audio ‘“ Digital Audio Extraction:

To test the digital audio extraction performance of the Lite-On SHW-1635S, 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; let us compare the result with other drives:

The drive is extremely fast at reading audio discs and the seek times are also very good, and the reported quality seems good too, but let us try the advanced DAE quality test as well.

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.

This is one of the few times that we can’t put our finger on anything negative in this test! Everything appears to be as good as it could possibly be.

DVD reading performance:

Again, we will use Nero CD-DVD Speed to measure the reading performance, this time for various types of DVD discs. The drive should read pressed single layer DVD-discs at 16X.

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.

This drive has no riplock and does nearly reach 16x with the single layer disc. The double layer disc is unfortunately only read at a low speed of 8x.

Let us take the good thing first; the drive has no riplock for single layer media and is very fast with single layer media. But for double layer discs it’s limited to 8x reading speed, which is pretty slow and we would like to see at least 12x reading speed.

 DVD+R/RW:

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:

Compared to the preview we could see that DVD+RW reading speed are lowered to only 6x.

It’s currently the fastest reader for DVD+R media, but the DVD+RW reading speed is very poor – only 6x which is slower than all other drives and even slower than the Lite-On SOHW-1673S!

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:

And the result is the same for DVD-R and DVD-RW, speeds are lowered to 12x for DVD-R and 6x for DVD-RW.

It’s currently the fastest reader for DVD-R media as well, but the DVD-RW reading speed is also very poor – only 6x which is slower than all other drives and even slower than the Lite-On SOHW-1673S!

Overall thoughts:

It’s a mix we may say, while CD reading, audio reading and DVD+/-R reading is very good ‘“ the reading performance for pressed double layer discs, CD-RW discs and DVD+/-RW discs is lower than we would like to see.

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