Customer Reviews

Lite-On SHW-1635SX External 16x DVD-RW Dual Drive

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was looking for DVD Writer that could work externaly on my Notebook and could be attached to my kids PC. I wanted a low price one, but with good functionality and performance. Lite-On SHW-1635SX is the one. It works fine.

I actually struggled with deciding if this was two stars or three for me, I opted for three I guess for the overall drive and product, but despite its 'supposed' ease, I found difficulties with it.

Straight out of the box and plugged in, I found there were really no 'clear' written instructions on what software to load first and what each of the bundled software packages actually did. All of the manuals are in .PDF format which are nice, and included, but I was still asking myself what each disc was for and what did I really need to load.

To my dissapointment, and through some trial-by-fire experimentation, I determined that the drive itself needed to have its firmware updated from Liteon immediately 2 versions newer than what shipped in box. Visiting the Liteon website could have been easier as the firmware and drivers seemed to have been buried. But once I did find them, I will say the setup and install phase was pretty darn good and straight foward.

The drive itself can be a little noisy at times, but I'm not sure what one expects from an external USB drive for this price point. It shouldn't be a problem if yoru are burining DVDs, but if you plan on using this device to watch DVD's, you may find the noise irritating after awhile.

My biggest complaint was some very frustrating trial and error burning my first DVD's. I used Verbatim DVD-R (the manual indicated DVD-R was an acceptable format), and I ended up wasting at least 6 DVD's before 1 actually wrote correctly. I keep receiving an 'Illegal Disc error' 1/2 way through the burn process and the troublshooting guide and onlien help have ZERO reference to this. It's puzzling because one disc did write successfully, a second one appeared to write correctly but failed on closing session, and the rest were all failures.

I solved this by using a Memorex DVD+R. This works fine, but at a much lower speed....5x as opposed to the capable 16x it can with DVD-R.

The pre-bundled Nero Express software has both pros and cons. The wizards seem straight forward, drag and drop files, and user intuitive...but over all, kind of high on resources and can be clunky at times. I had a few 'fatal errors' which suggests that while I am still running XP Professional, there are some bugs.

I had heard a lot of great things about Liteon, but overall I wasn't overly impressed. It just seems like another typical DVD writer/reader.

This external cd drive was recommended to me by a friend in the tech field. Bottom line, the product works great. A little noisy at higher RPM's, it is a minor issue. Speed can easily be increased or decreased and the spindle noise can be eliminated. Great reliability and well worth the money. The software with it is excellent.