What do you think of the Liteon SOHW-1693S?

[SexyMF]

http://www.liteonit.com/ODD/English/..._sohw1693s.asp


My DVD drive is all but dead. Its time for a new drive. This one looks good but it is fairly cheap. Why?

My choice list is:

http://www.pricespy.co.nz/cat_9.html

[uart]

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that drive. I didn't like some of Lite-on's earlier model burners but the 1673 and 1693 seem pretty solid drives. I like to have at least on liteon drive for scanning media, this is one nice feature of the liteon that not all other brands support. Basically it means that the drive can be made to report the underlying error rate on the disc (before error correction is invoked) so you can really get a good picture of just how good or bad is the blank DVD media you're using.

[SexyMF]

Cheers uart

[Kaman]

I'm runnin a 1693S and a 5236V (combo).
The 1693S isn't AS loud as the combo, but still noisier than most - burns great though. Worth the $, unless you're wanting an ultra quiet machine.

[SexyMF]

As it stands all my DVDs I rip to the HDD because of the slow access times and noise produced by the drive.

It is a very resonable price. As far as I know Liteon is reputable. I'll take the plung (given its not killer important)

[uart]

Yeah Liteon is reputable.

The LG 416X-B family (currently at 4167B I think) are also a very good drive at a reasonable price. The lite-on has a few more features that a "geek" might want (media scanning, ready availabilty of patched firmwares and various other geeky utilitys) whereas the LG burner is ideal for someone who just want to burn DVD's. It has excellent media compatability, it can burn DVD-RAM and does a great job with both +R and -R media in my testing. So you might want to consider that one as well.