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.
That’s odd, and a crying shame, too. I’m using an internal DVD burner [also Lite-ON] and it only took me 9 minutes to burn 4.7GB [add another 5 minutes for verification] onto a DVD+R.
9 minutes? WTF? What speed are you burning at? I’m new to this DVD+R burning scene, thats why I didnt know how long will it take to burn 4.7GB (not even roughly). But, damn, 9 minutes? compared to my 100 mins, its a crying shame indeed 🙁
That’s because yours is an external writer. It burns at a much slower speed than your writer specs because of the slow data transfer through the USB port. If you want to speed it up, get a USB2 port (which is damn expensive).
the size is really BIG…
your PC does not has USB 2.0 port?
vincent, thanks for the advice. I had suspected that it is because of the USB port too. Sucks that USB 2.0 is gonna be expensive. Gah!
LcF, nope, only shitty USB 1.1 🙁
Looks pretty cool, nice setup you got there 😀
lol, you havent seen the whole thing, it’s in a big mess
but thanks 😀