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Hi,

Sunday I purchased one of the Cendyne Lightning IV (48x12x48) drives OfficeMax was advertising for $20 (of course after rebates). Figured I couldn't lose much for $20 and based on the review from this site, it sounded like a decent drive.

When I got it home and unwrapped it, I was expecting to see a Lite-On drive. Instead I found a 48x24x48 generic drive??? The outside of the box is clearly label 48x12x48 and the part number is consistent with their website CDICD00118. The only indication that it is a 48x24 drive is the model number on the package, which is 4824P.

The question now becomes, who makes the drive and it is worth keeping? I know it is only $20, but I'd rather spend more and know what I have, than save a few $$$ and end up with a piece of junk. The Cendyne site does not even acknowledge a 48x24x48 drive.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Sound's like a BenQ.

http://www.benq.com.au/Showproduct.asp?prodID=71

Looking something like this (the Benq giveaway is the row of slots along the bottom of the drive):



I've had a couple of Benq drives, a 20x one at work and a 48x one at home, and neither were very good.

cfitz

Went back to OfficeMax and looked at the other Cendyne drive on sale this weekend: 52x24x52 for the low price of $40.

The box they had on the rack had the Lite-On model number on it, but when I received "my" box from the back room, it had a CRW-5224A model number on it.

Model number wise, it appears to be an Asus. Would everyone agree?

Is this a popular thing to do? Market a drive initially w/ one OEM and then change OEMs after a few months?

I'll have to look at the 48x24x48 drive when I get home to see if it has the BenQ look to it.

jeffjozwiak wrote:Is this a popular thing to do? Market a drive initially w/ one OEM and then change OEMs after a few months?

Yup.

cfitz wrote:http://www.benq.com.au/Showproduct.asp?prodID=71

Looking something like this (the Benq giveaway is the row of slots along the bottom of the drive):



I've had a couple of Benq drives, a 20x one at work and a 48x one at home, and neither were very good.

cfitz

I have a BenQ Cendyne 48x and thus far, it's working fine. Same deal as the poster's: $20 after rebate. Got my $30 rebate check yesterday as a matter of fact.

i bought my Cendyne 52x24x52x from staples, and the model number on the back said ltr-52246s, so i knew it was a litey before i made the purchase, after all the dust settled i got the drive for $12

I bought the Cendyne CDICD00118 - It is a BenQ 4824P. Firmware was D.IC I went to BenQ.au for a firmware update (D.LC) . So far the drive has been working okay. I bought this for my kids PC because it was dirt cheap at OfficeMax. I took some cheap 16x Cd's and burned them at max speed and they worked okay. It looks like it has a 2Mb buffer, access time is 95ms. I have yet to try the Nero utilities on it to see what it is capable of.

I personally use a Yamaha CRW-F1

I have a re-badged 4824P and it has pretty good write quality (using FW D.SC), and it's really fast, too!

P.S. Sorry to bring up an old thread, but I thought it might be worth it to put this info in.

Got the 4824p too, updated the firmware but not getting much speed out of it for some reason, it's slower then my old 16x Nec, not quite sure what I'm doing wrong with it.

It sounds like you don't have DMA enabled on your drive. Look in the FAQ forum for directions enabling DMA for your operating system.

you sure your also using a 80 conductor, 40 pin ide cable? if you only use a 40/40pin you can't use DMA

also don't settle with a benq or asus, go for the gold, get the ltr-52246s, but i know the staples i work at here is outta them, all they carry is the benq and asus models

i should know i am the one that stocks the business machines department, and also sell in that department too, beats any shitty officemax

hoxlund wrote:you sure your also using a 80 conductor, 40 pin ide cable? if you only use a 40/40pin you can't use DMA

Not true.

do the older 40 conductor cables do udma 33?

It's running at UDMA Mode 2, got it on secondery IDE master atm. I'm using Nero and enabled the real time burn speed. While my NEC shows a steady 16x all the time the Benq jumps up and down like crazy going all the way down to 10x.

hoxlund wrote:do the older 40 conductor cables do udma 33?

Yep. Keep in mind that DMA and UDMA aren't the same thing. You can enable DMA on drives that don't support UDMA 33, 66, etc.

I have my 4824P as Secondary Slave on a 40-wire/40-pin cable, and it works at its max speed that way. It's running UDMA 33.

What media and firmware revision are you using, MSX?

so its whats the deal liteonguy, your selling yourself out?

No, I'm not selling myself out, hoxlund. Lite-On is still my favorite brand of burner, and but I have found that my Benq to be working quite well. The only reason that I bought the Benq is that I got it FREE after rebates! It's not as good as an LTR-42246S, but, for what I paid for it, it was a good deal. I have been waiting patiently for the new LTR-52327S, but (considering that my otherwise fastest burner is a 32123S) I couldn't resist that deal!

cool, yeah, any ideas on when that new litey is coming out?

thanks for trying to help LiteOnGuy. I'm using FW D.SC and been trying both with TY and CMC discs, same result. I had the same problem with the FW that was on it when I got it too, dont remember what that was though

just remember to always keep your windows drive de-fragged, and try to always burn from your windows drive, in my experiance it gives the best burn results, and if its a litey drive use TY discs

Hoxlund: Sorry, I really don't know when the LTR-52327S is coming out, but I really want one! Especially for that 32x RW capability!

MSX: I am using CMC discs too, and it seems to work well with those. You mentioned that your Benq is running at UDMA33; what modes are your other drives (HDDs, other optical drives, etc) running at? Also, what brand of CMC discs are you using? I have used Spin-X 40x discs (again, I got them for free) and Imation discs with mine. Also, Hoxlund is right when he says that it's good to defrag your drive. I have found that Diskeeper Lite (which is free, I think you can get it at CNet's downloads) works much better than the Windows XP defragger.

haha, you guys and your free versions

The CMC ones are Memorex while TY discs are fuij, I haven't noticed any difference between them though.
Both the benq and the nec burner are on UDMA mode 2
I've got a 200 gb WD SE on a promise controller, My windows drive though is stuck on pio for some reason. Going to reinstall stuff and get windows on a WD 120gb SE, maybe the reinstall will help.
I've tried burning from both hd's with the same result.

I'm running fairly fragment free these days, but it's still weird cause the NEC has never had a problem even when burning files fragmented in 10k pieces (due to some programs I'm using are really bad at the whole filemanagement deal)