Lite-On 40/12/48X CD-RW


 

Review: Lite-On LTR-40125S
Speed: 40/12/48X CD-RW
Reviewer: OC-Freak
Provided by: Lite-On
Firmware: ZS0A and ZS0J

Lite-On IT, one of the worlds largest manufacturers of optical drives was kind enough to send us the Lite-On LTR-40125S 40/12/48X CD-RW drive for review.

ADVERTISEMENT

About Lite-On IT:

In 1995 Lite-On gathered some elite scientists 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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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 9th 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 were 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.

ADVERTISEMENT

What will we do?

In this review we will use both firmware version ZS0A and version ZS0J which adds Mount rainer support and P-CAV (Partial - Constant Angular Velocity) write technology. We will focus on the difference between these two versions, what the benefits with each version are and what the drawbacks are. We will also see how good the drive is compared to other drives, including the TEAC CD-W540E that we reviewed here. We will try the drive in several programs with different tasks to really show how well the drive performs. The drive has a rated write speed of 40X, a rewrite speed of 12X and a read speed of 48X. And to make this even better we have added some test results from an LTR-48125W which is just a LTR-40125S which we overclocked by flashing it with a binary firmware from a real LTR-48125W. This drive is rated at 48X Writing 12X rewriting and 48X reading, we will test the drive with firmware version VS02.

Our review computer:

Hardware:

  • Mainboard: Microstar K7T Turbo-R Limited Edition VIA KT133A
  • CPU: AMD Athlon 1,4GHz
  • Memory: 512Mb PC133
  • Harddisk: 2 Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80Gb 7200rpm ATA100 harddisks at a Promise fasttrack 100 IDE controller
  • USB Controller: NEC USB 2.0 Controller

System set-up:

DMA (Direct Memory Access) and Autorun was enabled for all devices, and all devices have the newest firmware currently available. The drive was connected as Primary master and identified itself as LITE-ON LTR-40125S. The reason why there is so many secondary IDE channels is that we had a second IDE controller in our test computer that also used the standard Windows XP driver.

Software:

  • Operating Sytem: Windows XP Professional English with all updates from windowsupdate installed.
  • VIA 4in1 driver: Version 4.39 beta
  • ASPI Layer: Adaptec ASPI layer version 4.71

Used Software:

For the tests we will be using the following software:

  • Ahead Nero Burning ROM version 5.5.8.2
  • Ahead InCD version 3.31
  • Ahead Nero InfoTool version 1.01
  • Ahead Nero CD-Speed version 0.85e beta
  • Elaborate bytes CloneCD version 4.0.1.3
  • Exact Audio Copy version 0.9 beta 4
  • G&M CDR Identifier v1.63
  • An Chen Computers CD-Mate version 2.2.5.30
  • Feurio 1.65

Let us take a look at what the package we got contained…


No posts to display