CDRLabs.com

A friend of mine got this drive recently and I decided to play with it a little...
First I got some crappy Memorex 10x CD-RW media (CMC Magnetics manufacturer) and tried to write at 10x with it with my older 16x10x40x CD-RW drive... put this into my Lite-On 166S DVD-ROM, ran K-Probe, and got a average C1 error rate of about 3.4. This drive really doesn't like these discs, it does have problems reading them back. Next I tried the same files on the same disc with my Toshiba SD-R5002. A bit better, 0.7 error rate. I did the same thing again with the LG combo drive. I got about 7 C1 errors in an entire 14 minute block. Very good! Is it time to retire my old 16x10x40x?

Next, I tried reading some DVD media in it. The Princo DVD-Rs that my other two DVD-ROM drives were struggling with (LG, Lite-On 16x) were read just fine in this drive.

Makes me want to get one for my own!

The same quality can be said about Lite-On's combo drive.

Either the Lite-On 166S is very accurate in reading all the C2s, or the Toshiba and LG are overwhelmed by all the C2s, thus leaving them out, giving you the wrong impression...

Hmm, I'm not sure if I was too clear on what I said... I recorded the disc at 10x with the Toshiba, LG, and LG combo, and read all three cases back on the Lite-On, giving the following errors:

LG - 3.4 (Nov. '01)
Toshiba - 0.7 (Dec. '02)
LG combo - 0.0 (June '03)

Does this suggest that newer drives give a higher quality recording on the same -RW disc? The purchase date of the drives is in brackets above.

DVD-ROM drives like the 166S should not be used for conducting CD-R C1/C2 quality tests using KProbe. KProbe does not give accurate results when testing CD-Rs on DVD-ROM drives. Your results have no meaning, and no conclusions should be drawn from them. Try testing on a Lite-On CD-RW drive using KProbe.

cfitz

and apparently similar things apply to CDRW/DVDROM combo drives...unreliable/inaccurate at testing with KProbe.

Try checking the results with Nero CD Speed's ScanDisc then I can add them to the Media Compatibility List.

Oh, best to run ScanDisc on the same drive that the CD-RW disc was burned in.