Lite-On’s iHAS424 is the first 24x DVD burner we’ve tested so far, and sadly, the experience doesn’t sell us on the speed bump. Currently, DVD+R media is capped at 16x speeds, but drive makers will nevertheless tweak their hardware to exceed that limit. Often such “over-speeding” techniques are restricted to higher-quality, name-brand media to ensure reliability—in Lite-On’s case that means DVD+R discs bearing the Taiyo Yuden brand. With anything else, you’re stuck at regular-ol’ 16x.

This was the caliber of performance we experienced in our tests, since we always use Verbatim media (manufactured by Mitsubishi) to evaluate optical drives. The iHAS424 filled a single-layer DVD+R disc in 5:53 (min:sec), with an average write speed of 11.66x. That’s more than a minute slower than Samsung’s SH-S223 22x drive (4:46), which happens to be tuned for Verbatim media, but not necessarily other brands (the upshot is that speed claims above 16x only apply to specific types of media). In DVD+R reads, the Lite-On and Samsung drives were more simpatico, with times of 4:56 and 4:55, respectively.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

Now that Lite-On is sharing the same drive manufacturing line as Plextor (not to mention Sony, HP, and Philips), you might wonder whether there is any difference between this 22x DVD burner and the Plextor PX-850SA 22x burner we reviewed in March. In fact, the two burners are virtually the same in terms of parts and mechanics, so differences really come down to the firmware each company uses and the tweaks and optimizations each makes to the final product.
 
The first thing we discovered is that Lite-On didn’t tweak this drive with an over-speed feature. So, like the Plextor PX-850SA, the burner stayed within the confines of the DVD+R media’s 16x rating, writing 4.38GB of data to a single-layer disc in 5:43 (min:sec). Samsung’s SH-S223, which can reach 20x-plus speeds when writing to 16x media, was almost a minute faster, at 4:46.

Continue reading this review after the jump.