The specifications of the Liteon iHBS112 state that the drive is able to write CD-R/RW discs at 40x/24x. Let us find out how the drive really performs in speed and quality.

Writing Data CD-R discs:

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Write quality:

We will test CD-R discs from many different CD-R manufacturers. To really measure the write speed, we used the “create data CD” function in Opti Drive Control. The discs were written at the maximum speed that the drive supports. For the quality test, we used Opti Drive Control Disc Quality Scan and combined this with a Transfer Rate Test to test if the resulting disc was readable. Also note that different drives and different reading speeds may affect the results obtained when scanning the discs. We used an Optiarc AD-7240S drive with firmware 1.03 and scanned the discs at 48X speed.

There is more than one way to handle C1 and C2 error detection/correction, but a simple and common way is to detect and correct up to two errors per frame in each stage and detect three or more errors:

• E11: 1 error detected and corrected by C1 layer
• E21: 2 errors detected and corrected by C1 layer
• E31: 3 or more errors detected but not corrected by C1 layer

The sum of these (per second) is called the Block Error Rate: BLER=E11+E21+E31

• E32: 3 or more errors detected but not corrected by C2 layer

Any E31 is un-correctable by the C1 layer and will result in the bytes in that frame being redistributed into multiple frames which are passed to the C2 layer.

Any E32 is un-correctable by the C2 layer and will result in interpolation being used for Audio CDs or will result in third layer error correction being used for Data CDs.

Different drives have different ways of reporting these errors in a Disc Quality scan. 

Here is an easier way to look at Disc Quality Scanning:

A written CD-R disc will always have some C1 errors; C1 errors are easily corrected by the drive’s error correction capabilities. The next level of errors is C2, while C2 errors could also be corrected by most drive’s error correction capabilities; they are not wanted on a good quality disc. A good disc should not contain any C2 errors, and preferably have an average C1 error amount of below 2.0 for the best discs, or at least below 10.0 averages for good quality discs. After C2 errors, there are only un-correctable errors that will make a disc unusable.

In short, our analysis will be based on this guideline to determine the quality of the burned disc:

CD-R/RW quality scans guideline

Below are the obtained results:

A fair result to start our CD-R quality tests, also we can see that some improvement is needed.

Our maxell media manufactured by ritek has burned with very good quality.

Another fair result for this media.

The Result is OK for this media.

The result is good but we expected something better.

Writing quality with CD-RW media

The results is OK for a rewritable media.

Summary:

With the Liteon iHBS112 writing CD-R/RW at a maximum speed of 48x/24x, the drive is one of the fastest at writing CD-R discs, but not as fast when it comes to CD-RW. However, the writing quality is simply good in most cases, but we believe that there is room for improvement.

Now let’s head on to the next page where we will test DVD recordable performance….

• Reading performance
• DVD+R/RW Writing performance