I usually don’t ask questions first. I don’t have a friend at LG though I guess I know what you meant by friends. I am much closer to Lite-On sources.
I don’t think 8x DVD-RAM or 8x DVD+RW/DVD-RW is important at this time. So LG won’t bother. Try to look at it from LG’s point of view. What will you do if you have to make and sell 50,000,000 DVD writers in a year? Naturally, the most lilely idea is to make sure all the major features that the most number of people need work correctly. They are the average PC-Windows users in Asia, America, Europe, and Africa, with the biggest and most important orders usually from the US of A. You CANNOT risk taking responsibility of write failures with DVD media rated at 4x by allowing the consumers to write at 8x, 2x faster than the rated. However, you can always blame the media manufacturers if the drives cannot write to some less privilegdged makers like CMC and Gigastorage at the rated speeds. 5x DVD-RAM in GSA-4120B was important in symbolic rather than practical sense because the main two competitors of rewritable DVD technologies were only at 4x, not necessarily for LG alone, but also for Hitachi, the main designer of ALL LG DVD writers so far. Since OEM orders from Dell are most likely based on unit prices and whether the maker can ship, say, 100,000 drives by a certain date, that also becomes a key priority. Less number of components is always a good thing for that. Using cheaper components, too. Removing a bundle media can save millions at once. None of the above is necessarily a logical decision making by any means but they are likely to do so as managers and executives.
But they’d listen to me if I had a doctor’s degree from Caltech or MIT or Harvard.
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and right now SATA external interfaces are out but i dont think they support opticals yet.