Introduction
Just a couple of years ago, 1080p TVs were a thing of miracles and if you were to mention that you had a Blu-Ray drive, you would be considered a sort of miniature deity. Well, maybe not that extreme, but the fact still remains that in order to get your hands on a BD player you either had to get a PS3 or wait and spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get it from other manufacturers. Today however, the both 1080p TV and Blu-Rays are becoming more and more popular as well as more affordable. If you are looking for an inexpensive drive to stick into your home theater PC and are aren’t really looking to burn Blu-Ray titles , which keep in mind still cost a lot to buy, then the LITE-ON iHOS104 might be for you.
Features
-
SATA interface, 5 ¼” Half-Height internal BD ROM drive.
Max. 4X BD-ROM/BD-RE SL and 4X BD-ROM/BD-R/BD-RE DL CAV reading
Max. 8X DVD-ROM/+R/+RW/+RDL/-R/-RW/-RWDL CAV reading
Max. 32X CD-ROM/R/RW CAV reading
-
Fast access time and high data transfer rate, could be vertical mounted (optional)
-
SMART-X(*) function smartly adjusts CD-DA / VCD / DVD data extraction to a fastest allowable speed according to both data request rate from host and disk quality
-
Supporting DOS 6.xx, Windows XP/ 2003/ Vista and Linux Operating System
-
BD read compliant: BD data, BD video of 12 cm diameter
- CD read compliant: CD-DA,CD-ROM, CD-ROM/XA , Photo-CD, Multi-session Video-CD, CD-I FMV, CD Extra, CD Plus, CD-R , and CD-RW discs of 8 or 12 cm diameter
- DVD read compliant: DVD single/dual layer (PTP, OTP), DVD-R(4.7G), DVD-R multi-borders DVD-R Double Layer, DVD+R, DVD+R multi-sessions, DVD+R Double Layer, DVD-RW and DVD+RW disc
- Flash ROM support on line programming capability
- Serial ATA Revision 2.6, ATA-8, MMC-6 and SFF-8090 V7 compliant
- MPC level 3, PC2001 System Design Guide, MultiRead/UDF compliant
- Support Ultra DMA mode 5
Specifications
It is important to remember that the iHOS104 is a BD ROM, this means that this particular model is unable to write Blu-Ray disks but just read them. Another thing that caught my eye are the read and write speeds of the older standards – DVD and CD. While most new drives offer CD read speeds of 48X some 52X, and DVD read speeds of 16X, this particular mode only offers 8X on the DVDs and 32X on the CDs. This should not impact sequential playback, but might have an effect on asynchronous data retrieval from the disks in question (user selecting different scenes).
| Performance |
|
||||||||||||
| Interface | SATA | ||||||||||||
| Buffer Size | 2 Mbytes |
||||||||||||
| Disc Formats | DVD read compliant: DVD single/dual layer (PTP, OTP), DVD-R(4.7G), DVD-R multi-borders DVD-R Double Layer, DVD+R, DVD+R multi-sessions, DVD+R Double Layer, DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs | ||||||||||||
| Physical Characteristics |
Dimension: 146 X 42 X 186 mm (W x L x D) Weight: <0.8 kg | ||||||||||||
| Power Requirements |
P4 D 3.0 CPU / 1G RAM or above for High-Definition movie playback and authoring | ||||||||||||
| General |
|
It would have been nicer to test the drive with a more htpc oriented CPU (core i3 and athlon 2) and test how does the BD playback affect the system resources (mem and CPU usage)