Lite-On LTC-48161H Combo

October 5, 2003

Review: Lite-On LTC-48161H Combo
Reviewer: OC-Freak
Provided by: Lite-On IT
Firmware: KH0N
Manufactured: May 2003

Lite-On IT was kind enough to send us their latest combo drive; the Lite-On LTC-48161H. We have pretty good knowledge with Lite-On drives, as we have reviewed several of their drives earlier. Lite-On IT is one of the main players in the optical market, Lite-On IT is actually just one part of the large Lite-On company. The Lite-On company produces a lot of different products: keyboards, power supplies and optical drives is just a few of them. But let us concentrate on the Lite-On IT as it's them we are dealing with.

Some Lite-On history:

In 1995 Lite-On gathered some elite scientist and engineers from ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute) to start an optical storage research and manufacturing business in Taiwan. Currently they have over 130 engineers with Master & Ph. D. degrees in their Research & Development team, that are dedicated to the development of their patented anti-vibration mechanical design, advanced circuit design, firmware programming & performance tuning. The Research & Development team achievement is a key factor that has ensured their success in product development.

In 1997, Lite-On established a large manufacturing facility in China enabling them to provide optimum OEM/ODM support to all 1st-Tier PC makers, which further demonstrated their success in the worldwide Optical drive market. Today, they are among top-3 optical drive manufacturer worldwide, mostly due to attractive pricing and quality filled products, along with large OEM contracts. They have also received top brand name recognition in many regions. These achievements, plus superb management visions and planning, enabled them to continue their growth and profit even at times when the optical drive market experienced "price-wars" and many optical drive manufacturers were forced out.

In 1999, they created LITE-ON Information Technology Corporation, another proud member of the Lite-On Group, to concentrate on developing and manufacturing optical drives to stay strong in the storage business. They are going to carry on the tradition of developing optical drives to expand their research and manufacturing capacity to new generations of products such as DVD drives, High speed CD-RW drives and COMBO drives to stay strong in both the retail and OEM/ODM market.

At 9^th July 2001 Lite-On IT signed a co-operation contract with JVC, a famous Japanese electrical company, to be in alliance with each other. Two new companies was established, one is the optical drives manufacturing sales company, named as JVC LITE-ON IT Manufacturing & Sales, Limited (JLMS) , the other is pick-up head developing & manufacturing company.

JVC is a pioneer in development of key components of optical drives and consumer electronics as well, Lite-On IT is excellent in volume manufacturing and developing, also skilled in IT industry. That kind of strategic alliance would benefit both companies.

If you have read our previous Lite-On review you may already feel familiar with this company information, so let us now take a look at the specifications of this drive:

48x 24x 48x + 16x Combo Drive

LTC - 48161H

Features :

*	ATAPI/E-IDE Half-Height 48x Write, 24x Rewrite, 48x Read, and 16x DVD-ROM Read Speed
*	SMART-BURN avoiding Buffer Under Run error, Automatically adjusting writing strategy & running OPC to provide the best burning quality
*	SMART-X Smart Monitoring & Adjusting Read-speed Technology for eXtraction
*	VAS® to reduce vibration & noise during recording & reading
*	Support Fixed Packet, Variable Packet, TAO, SAO, DAO, Raw Mode Burning & Over-Burn
*	Support formats of CD Family, CD-R & CD-RW discs ( up to 99min. )
*	Support formats of DVD Family, single/dual layer ( PTP, OPT ), DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW
*	Conforms to Orange Book Part 2, 3, Volume 2: High Speed & MMC2 commands
*	Support PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2 and Ultra DMA mode 2
*	Support Mt. Rainier

Specifications:

*	Speed :
		Write	CD-R	48x ( 7200KB/sec ) CAV ( 21x ~ 48x )
		ReWrite	CD-RW	24x ( 3600KB/sec ) CAV (3600KB/sec) CAV
		Read	CD Family	48x ( 7200KB/sec ) CAV ( 20x ~ 48x ), DAE Maximum Speed 48x CAV
			DVD Family	16x ( 21600KB/sec ) CAV ( 2x ~ 16x )
*	Access Time :
		CD Family	120ms
		DVD Family	140ms
*	Buffer Size : 2MB
*	PC Required :
		Pentium 166MHz or faster CPU, 64MB DRAM Required
		HDD must have access time < 20ms, with a minimum of 100MBytes Free space
*	Disc Formats :
		Support formats of CD family both 8cm & 12cm disc
*	Support Operating System :
		Windows 95 / 98 / NT / ME / XP / 2000
*	MTBF ( Life ) : 70,000 Hours
*	Audio Spec. :
		S/N > 70dB; Rare Panel Output > 0.7Vrms@1KHz
*	Environment :
		Operating	5C to 50C; Relative Humidity : 15% to 80%
		Non-Operating	-40C to 60C; Relative Humidity : 15% to 95%
*	Dimension :
		145 ( W ) x 41.3 ( H ) x 170 ( D ) mm
*	Weight : < 0.9 Kg
*	Voltage Requirements :
		+5V +/-5% and less than 100 mVp-p ripple voltage
		+12V +/-5% and less than 200 mVp-p ripple voltage

Specification wise it seems to be a good all-round drive and in this review we will try to see if this is true.

Test machine:

For this review we will be using a computer with the following configuration:

Hardware:

⋅         Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8KNXP with Intel i875P chipset.
⋅         Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2,8GHz 800MHz FSB with Hyper Threading support.
⋅         RAM: 1Gb PC3500 DDR
⋅         GFX: ATI Radeon 9800 pro
⋅         Sound: SB Audigy 2
⋅         Hard disks: 2 x Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80Gb in RAID 0

System set-up :

The Lite-On LTC-48161H was connected as Secondary master and identified itself as LITE-ON COMBO LTC-48161H. Both autorun and DMA (Direct Memory Access) was enabled for all devices.

Software:

Windows XP professional is installed on the computer along with Service Pack 1 for windows XP. We will be using the following software in this review:

⋅         Ahead InCD v3.5.24.0
⋅         Ahead Nero Burning ROM version 6.0.0.11 and 6.0.0.19
⋅         Ahead Nero CD/DVD Speed v2.02.2 beta
⋅         Ahead Nero InfoTool v2.00
⋅         Elaborate Bytes CloneCD v4.2.0.2
⋅         Blindwrite suite v4.5.7
⋅         Exact Audio Copy v0.95 prebeta 3
⋅         K-Probe v1.1.23 and 1.1.26