I have a Lite-ON SOHC-5236V Combo drive and I find that if I forget to reduce the burn speed down to say 32x or 24x (ie I leave it at 52x) when I burn CD-Rs that are more than about 70% full I just get coasters.
It doesn’t burn that brilliantly at 32x either.
Is this normal for this drive or is it faulty?
My SOHR-5238S is a much better CD burner so I might just go back to using that and use my DVD writer for reading DVDs.
Yeah the newer Liteon’s are not that great at burning CD’s at full speed. :Z IF and when
I do burn a CD I always burn a data CD at 24x or less and when I do a music CD I always
burn it at the lowest speed most of the time like 8x or the lowest that I can get the CD to
go down to and still burn. 
This isn’t just “not that great”, they really are coasters, the last 20-30% of the disk might as well have never been written at all. NERO will abandon the attempt to verify after burning. Disk scans cannot complete either.
Looks like Lite-On writers have little going for them now then. Just the neat trouble free way the DVD drives can be switched to RPC-1.