From 700MB to 4.7Gigs!

Yay! My DVD Writer arrived last night! The LiteOn SOHW-1653SX exter­nal DVD-dual drive came packed in a huge box, roughly the size of my sub­woofer. The con­tents were, the drive itself, USB cable, power sup­ply cable, AC/DC Power adapter, some man­u­als, and it came bun­dled with Nero 6 and Pow­erDVD 5. And oh yeah, it costs a gay-RM549.Edit: Oops, for­got the dimen­sions, it mea­sures at 17cm x 6cm x 20 cm

The drive sup­ports the DVD+R / DVD+RW / DVD+R9 / DVD-R / DVD-RW / DVD-ROM / CD-R / CD-RW / CD-ROM for­mat and could write up to 16X with DVD+R media, 12X with DVD-R media, and 4X with DVD+RW and –RW.

Some pics of the 1653SX:

It boasts a black plas­tic cas­ing, kinda like a lunch box to me and has a stand for it to be placed ver­ti­cally. It weighs a whop­ping 1.3KG (!) and takes a lit­tle effort to lift it wih one hand. At the back of it lies a USB port and and power cable port. I fixed the power cable to the plug and then the USB cable to the port and the drive burst into life. This is when Win­dows XP’s best fea­ture — Plug and play comes in, no fuss, no installing. It was imme­di­ately iden­ti­fied as drive I:.

Sweet! So I got 4.7Gigs to burn on one DVD. My dad already had bought a pack of 15 DVD+Rs so its test­ing time. I slid a DVD R in and fired up Nero. I wanted to burn the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas DVD iso which was still lying on my HD. A few clicks and the drive was set to work, burn­ing at 8x (11,000 KB/s). Burn­ing 4 Gigs wasnt as easy as you think. The time left’ timer on Nero showed that it was going to take 7 mins to fin­ish but 7 mins went by and the counter stopped at 00.00.00 with only 8% com­pleted. To my hor­ror, I real­ized that for every 1% increase, it took 1 minute! That means for it to reach 100% (thus, fin­ish burn­ing) it’ll take 100 min­utes, which is 1 hour and 40 min­utes! I was like, DAMN, this is gonna be gay.

So, I left it there burn­ing until mid­night. It was windy out­side and the thun­der growled occa­sion­aly. Then sud­denly the power went unsta­ble and my freak­ing PC restarted. Long story short, the burn­ing failed, wasted the DVDR and that was the first try. Well I gotta try burn­ing again maybe tom­mor­row and see what this drive really made of.

Also, tom­mor­row, I’m gonna get some dual-layers since the writer can sup­port dual-layers and then ill have 8 sweet Gigs to fill :p I’ll see if we could get some cheap deals at the PC fair going on at Wisma Saberkas. Tom­mor­row is the last day of the three-day fair and every­one knows the best deals are on the last day.
Welp, thats all I guess.