Lite-On SOHW-812S DVD±RW Burner

Reviewed by James Sams on 05/20/2004

There are several major draw backs to this drive. The first is the slow DVD reading speeds. Although it is supposed to support 12x read speads, every program showed it as having only 8x reading. While this is, as far as we can tell, limited to this drive, it is problematic. The second is that there is no Mount Rainer support. Mount Rainer is a very convenient way to keep data on CDs up-to-date. However, as stated earlier, with DVD+RW, the need for Mount Rainer is drastically reduced, as it operates in a very similar manner, and DVD writing is faster per MB. The 2MB buffer should also be increased to 8MB.

There are several small features that make this drive worth buying. Most obvious is the price tag. At $88.50 at places like NewEgg, you can't go wrong. While three times the price of current DVD-ROM combo drives, it is well within the price range of most consumers. Given that this is really the only drive you need in your system, unless you do lots of disk-to-disk copying without making a harddrive backup, you can probably offload both of your current optical drives to cover half the cost of this one.

Lite-On imprints the pin and jumper layouts on the back of the drive, making it very obvious where the jumper needs to go. No need to flip the drive every which way to make sure you have your orientation right. Also, the use of multiple LEDs in the drive to indicate if it is reading or writing is convenient. Many drive manufacturers no longer do this, and it's nice to see Lite-On sticking to that practice. Tools, like Smart-X and Smart-Burn, help improve burning stability while increasing speed as the media allow, are quite capable at keeping your burn safe from poorly made media or poor handling of hold RW disks. The BookType tool, while not 100% effective, was helpful for getting our video DVD+R's to play in several more players than they otherwise would. Though we see more use for this in +RW media where you can change the BookType back when convenient.

The labs continue to wait for SATA optical drives. As the x86 world converts its entire motherboard architecture to PCI-Express and SATA, we expect to see the number of drives produced with SATA interfaces to start hitting shelves in the next year. Manufacturers that get to that place first will earn the respect of early adopters, driving the rest of the market place in their direction.

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