Got my Lite-On 166S today

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers LiteOn / PLDS / Sony Writer
#1

It comes with Power DVD 4.0 XP; I know some of you were wondering about that. It’s a really short drive, a full inch shorter (that’s 2.5cm for you Euros) than my LTR-48125W. It’s the shortest drive I have ever seen to date. It has Firmware version “DS08”, and it sports 512K buffer. According to Nero Info Tool it is an RPCII drive, and it reads everything in CD formats, and DVD formats like the 165H does. One thing I have noticed about this drive is it is really fast at reading CD-R’s, the fastest I’ve seen for a DVD drive. I am comparing to drives I have owned, or played with, which would be the AOpen 1240, the AOpen 1648, and the Pioneer 106S, and the BTC 16X DVD drive. Another thing I have noticed is that it works fine with my backup copy of War Craft 3… The Pioneer 106S was the only one that wouldn’t give the backup War 3 disc a pass. BTW, the AOpen 1640 Pro A is also a Pioneer 106S for those of you looking to avoid copy protection friendly (or unfriendly depending on your point of view) DVD drives don’t get the AOpen 1640 Pro A or the Pioneer 106S.

Just noticed that JLMS released a new Firmware for this new drive today, its dated 10-02-02, it still 10-01-02 in my area of the world. Anyway, its “DS0B”… “more media match”.

#2

Great!
How fast is it reading CD-ROM?
Could you post a pic from CDSPeed? :slight_smile:

#3

Here, this guy did…

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=6619

This drive easily outperforms any other DVD I have had in the past at reading CD-R disc’s… just a seat of the pants observation, no benchmark data to back it up. I noticed this most when re-loading Windows 2000 or XP fresh to a machine from a backup CD-R copy, this drive copies the files over to the hard drive noticeably faster than any other DVD drive I have ever used so far. I once had a True-X 72X CD-ROM too, it was crap with CD-R’s and especially CD-RW’s which I seldom use. But if a drive can’t cut it with CD-R media correctly it bothers me since I have a great deal of CD-R media. The AOpen 1240 model DVD was the worst I’ve tried, it worked fine, but was painfully slow at copying files over. Like I said, I have no hard data to show, and it could be my perception… except with the AOpen 1240 DVD, there is no question that it was a Dog with CD-R media!