In 1995 Lite-On gathered some elite scientists and engineers from ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute) to start an optical storage research and manufacturing business in Taiwan. Currently they have over 130 engineers with Master & Ph. D. degrees in their Research & Development team, that are dedicated to the development of their patented anti-vibration mechanical design, advanced circuit design, firmware programming & performance tuning. The Research & Development team achievement is a key factor that has ensured their success in product development.

In 1997, Lite-On established a large manufacturing facility in China enabling them to provide optimum OEM/ODM support to all 1st-Tier PC makers, which further demonstrated their success in the worldwide Optical drive market. Today, they are among top-3 optical drive manufacturer worldwide, mostly due to attractive pricing and quality filled products, along with large OEM contracts. They have also received top brand name recognition in many regions. These achievements, plus superb management visions and planning, enabled them to continue their growth and profit even at times when the optical drive market experienced “price-wars” and many optical drive manufacturers were forced out.

In 1999, they created LITE-ON Information Technology Corporation, another proud member of the Lite-On Group, to concentrate on developing and manufacturing optical drives to stay strong in the storage business. They are going to carry on the tradition of developing optical drives to expand their research and manufacturing capacity to new generations of products such as DVD drives, High speed CD-RW drives and COMBO drives to stay strong in both the retail and OEM/ODM market.

At 9th July 2001 Lite-On IT signed a co-operation contract with JVC, a famous Japanese electrical company, to be in alliance with each other. Two new companies were established. One is the optical drives manufacturing sales company, named as JVC LITE-ON IT Manufacturing & Sales, Limited (JLMS), the other is pick-up head developing & manufacturing company.

JVC is a pioneer in development of key components of optical drives and consumer electronics as well. Lite-On IT is excellent in volume manufacturing and developing, also skilled in IT industry. That kind of strategic alliance would benefit both companies.

LiteOn CD-RW drives are very famous nowadays, since they are not only pretty cheap, but also have proven that “you get what you pay for” is not true in some cases. But is the drive as good as expected? How fast is 52x writing actually? Will you notice the difference compared to 48x at all? And what about 24x rewriting?

Speed is not the only thing which matters of course. So how does the drive perform with different brands of media? Does it handle protected audio discs? Which copy protections can be circumvented? Does it feature major improvements over former LiteOn CD writers, besides increased speed? Is 52x certified media required for 52x writing? Is it worth the extra money, compared to a 48x writer? And, last but not least: How does it compare to Plextor drives?

These are the questions this review is going to answer, and hopefully helps you to decide which CD writer you want to have.

Test machine:

OS: Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 3
Mainboard: Asus P4B533-E
CPU: Pentium 4, clock speed 2900 MHz
Memory: 1 piece of 512 MB DDR-266
GFX: Geforce 2 GTS
Hard discs: 2×80 GB (WD800BB) as Raid-0 (Promise FastTrak 100TX2)
USB 2.0 / Firewire: onboard controllers
ATAPI Drives:
- Prim. Master: LiteOn LTR 48125W (UDMA 33)
- Sec. Master: Pioneer DVR-A03 (MW-DMA)
- Sec. Slave: LiteOn LTR 52246S (UDMA 33)
- Onboard UDMA controller: Toshiba SD-M1502 (UDMA 33)

The LiteOn drive has been attached as secondary slave, and shares one IDE channel with another drive which does not support UDMA, but only MW-DMA. After booting windows, the drive was detected automatically, and UDMA was enabled without a further reboot. Autorun has been disabled.

Used software:

Now let’s look at the package…

The Package

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