Lite-On SH16A7S
Feb 19th, 2007 | By Archive
Lite-On SH16A7S
Date
: 02/19/07 – 03:22:06 AM
Author
:
Category
: Optical Devices
Page 1 : Index
Manufacturer
: Lite-On IT Corporation
Price
: OEM â $31.99 USD Retail â $37.99
The optical drive market is large and diverse and one of the companies leading the industry is Lite-On IT Corporation through their development of new products and their ability to keep costs low. It wasn't too long ago when DVD±RW drives cost over hundred dollars but now you can find them for less than forty bucks!
The
SH-16A7S
is one of the first SATA drives by Lite-On out on the market. It features high speed DVD±RW, DVD±R9, and DVD-RAM. With a price of just over thirty dollars, you'd be hard pressed to say this drive is not affordable.
So what exactly does this drive feature that makes it stand out from Plextor, Pioneer, Samsung and the likes? Read on and find out today.
Page 2 : Package
The SH-16A7S arrived at my door as a retail package; that doesn't stop you from picking up the OEM package and saving yourself a couple of dollars. If you do decide to pick up the retail package, this is what you'll see at the store.
On the back of the box you will see the specifications and features. We'll be providing a detailed look at this in our upcoming pages.
The side of the package describes some of the features, outlines the package contents, and lists the system requirements. This is done in two different languages, below is the English side.
The top of the package is not wasted, a quick look at the drive and the read/write speeds are posted.
You'll also notice that it states a spare beige bezel is included. This is if you happen to have a beige/silver looking case and don't like the look of the stock black one. My review sample is actually the OEM unit packaged inside a retail box with a few accessories; as such, I don't have the extra bezel.
Page 3 : Specifications & Features
Navigating through Lite-On's website is certainly not difficult. It only took me a few seconds to find the general product page and eventually the SH-16A7S product page.
Starting with the specifications, this is what the SH-16A7S carries:
And now the features:
I don't want to fill this page with a ton of technical details, but if you're not clear on the differences between all the DVD formats, I'll link you to their respective Wikipedia pages.
DVD-ROM
DVD-R
DVD-RW
DVD-R9 or DVD-R DL
DVD-RAM
DVD+R
DVD+RW
DVD+R9 or DVD+R DL
Page 4 : Package Content
My package is a combination of an OEM kit with the retail box for demonstration purposes. Inside my box I had a carefully packaged optical drive with Nero Essentials and a SATA cable.
The optical drive itself is not significantly larger than the size of a DVD.
What I found missing from the package was a set of screws for mounting. However, this may not be the fault of Lite-On as the custom agents decided to inspect the package before letting it past the border.
Looking at the label on the top of the drive, we can see the exact model number and the manufactured date.
Whether the drive is IDE or SATA, the disc tray looks exactly the same as all other drives.
The rear of the drive is where we see all the differences compared to your typical IDE optical drive. Instead of a 4-pin power connector, we have the SATA power connector and a SATA connector replaces the 40-pin IDE connector.
The physical drive installation is quite simple. Once you slide the drive into your drive bay and mount it with the screws, just plug in the SATA power cable and data cable and you're good to go. The beauty of the SATA cable is how easy it is to hide compared to the IDE cable. The new technology makes cable organizing significantly easier.
With the drive physically installed, it's time to fire up the system and go over any specifications worth noting.
Page 5 : Software & Test Configuration
There isn't a whole lot when it comes to software configurations for an optical drive. With modern operating systems, the drivers essentially install themselves and the software updates as necessary. After I fired up Nero InfoTool, I was immediately able to browse the details of the Lite-on SH-16A7S.
We can immediately see the support formats and firmware used on the SH16A7S. Moving over a tab, details of the inserted media are shown. Here you can tell if your disc will be able to achieve maximum read and write speeds. My Verbatim blanks are capable of 16X.
The configuration tab indicates what channel the drive is on.
The software tab is fairly obvious.
For the tests I will be running the drive on my Windows XP SP2 machine with CD-DVD Speed 4.7 and KProbe 2. Other drivers are indicated on the drivers tab which I will not preview.
The operating system is currently running on my personal desktop machine, nothing fancy as you can see from the hardware tab.
Last but not least, Nero dedicates a section to whether or not ASPI has been installed. If you're using Nero, you'll be in good shape. The basic system does not have ASPI enabled.
In order to test the SH-16A7S optical drive, I've collected a variety of discs which I'll turn into coasters through CD-DVD Speed and Kprobe 2. Both software applications will create their own data discs and I'll subject them to various seek times and scans with an ample amount of screen shots for your reference.
Prior to any data disc creations, I used the SH16A7S as my main media burning drive. I'm a big fan of using Nero Vision to turn my videos into media discs that I can then play on my standalone DVD player. I'm happy to say that all my videos were etched on to the DVD without any problems and played without a hitch.
Page 6 : DVDR
Single write DVDs must be the most common ones out in the market. As the costs continue to drop, the amount I collect and go through each year just keeps going up.
I took six 16X DVD+Rs and six 16X DVD-Rs to ensure the results I got were consistent. I will only show the results once as the write results were consistent every time.
My preferred media for testing is Verbatim. The particular DVD+R discs I have with me have a MID (Media ID) of MCC 004.
The SH16A7S didn't have any problems pushing this DVD to its limit as it achieved the 16X write speed just before hitting the end of the disc.
The average speeds for both read and write transfer was 12X. I was a little surprised to see how erratic the CPU usage was for all the tests.
Moving onto the less visited pages of CD-DVD Speed, we first have the Disc Quality tab. Evaluating the media we see that the disc quality is rated at 95/100 which is pretty good. We also see there aren't many PI Errors or Failures. This means you shouldn't have any problems reading the disc after you burn it.
A quick surface scan of the disc shows that every file got a clean bill of health.
The disc quality from the PI Error and Failure test does not necessarily mean you'll have poor recording. As you'll see later in the review, rewriteables will have a much lower disc quality but the scan is just as good.
A second test conducted with Kprobe v2.0 was done on a second disc to very the results indicated by Nero.
There was definitely no difficulty in achieving the 16X speed. It looks like the max speed was achieved around the same spot and the average speed was also 12X.
The PIE/PIF results were also identical.
While at this point I've only done tests on one type of media, the results are already looking fairly promising. Let's take a quick look at the DVD-Rs and see if we can start drawing an early conclusion.
The DVD-Rs that I will be using are manufactured by Verbatim and have an MID of MCC 03RG20.
As I progressed through the normal CD-DVD Speed, I didn't see any major abnormalities. The write process hit 16X just before reaching the end of the DVD and the average speed was once again 12X. When it comes to speed, whether or not you use ±R has no impact.
The Disc Scan once again showed no signs of error and we ended with another high disc quality score of 95.
While I did have a few PI failures and PI Errors, this is normal and should be no cause for concern when it comes to the SH-16A7S.
The quick surface scan yielded a perfect read; with a high quality disc I would expect this type of result.
Using a second disc and starting up KProbe, we get the same type of results. There were definitely no problems in achieving the 16X mark, it again showed up near the end of the disc.
The disc scan revealed the similar results as what the Nero scan did. Even the max number of failures is the same; this merely indicates that the quality of the disc has a bigger factor on the end result of your burn than the drive itself.
We'll take a quick look at dual layer discs and re-writeables before wrapping up the review.
Page 7 : DVD+RDL & DVDRW
Both dual layer and re-writeable discs add an additional element of challenge to optical drive. As the name implies, dual layers have two layers in which the optical drive can write on. With a second layer of writing required, the drive is susceptible to writing errors, particularly at high speeds. This is why you don't find any high speed DL disc. That and the fact that even the low speed discs cost an arm and a leg to manufacture.
For the SH-16A7S, it is capable of 8X DVD+RDL. This is actually quite fast and the media is hard to come by. The best I could do was find some measly 4X MKM 001 Verbatim.
At half the rated speed, SH-16A7S had no difficulty in reaching the disc's max speed.
When it comes to the read speed, you can see that the highest speed is always when the laser is furthest away from the center of the disc. The same profile would have been observed had I found 8X DVD+RDLs.
As I mentioned earlier, sandwiching two layers onto one disc increases the likelihood of read errors and this once again comes from manufacturer. You'll notice in the image below that the second layer has significantly more PIE and PIFs. This is quite common and makes sense as if you need to write on a second layer through the first, you would expect to encounter minute deficiencies.
That double layer writing, however, does not prevent us from achieving an overall high disc quality score of 93. This just reiterates the fact that the high PIE/PIF on the second layer is nothing to be concerned about.
The surface scan reveals that the disc is still perfectly readable despite the high errors and failures.
Moving over the Kprobe with a second disc we see that the software used to write onto the disc plays no effect on its performance. The maximum speed was once again 4X.
The trend of seeing a higher errors and failures on the second layer is also obvious.
However, the disc is still perfectly readable. If you haven't realized, it takes a lot of failures before a disc can't be readable or writable. We see further evidence of this when we look at the re-writeables as their disc quality score is significantly lower due to their repeated use.
We'll start this investigation by looking at a Ritek DVD+RW. This puppy is good up to 8X and I've used in all of my optical drive reviews.
With re-writables, you'll find the write speed is staged. This particular piece started off at 6X and jumped up to 8X at the 1.5 GB mark.
When I did the disc quality scan, I got a score of 70. Significantly lower than a single write disc, but we'll see later in the review that the disc is still perfectly readable. A quick way to improve the disc quality is by doing full formats and not quick erases.
I was surprised to see how consistent the scan went. I'm slightly curious to know if the high error at the beginning of the disc is related to how often the disc gets used. If you don't write a small number of files, you'll only end up using the first bit.
Either way, the overall scan looks good and the same can be said for the scan disc as there weren't any read issues.
We get the same results when the disc was erased and the tests were completed with Kprobe.
Last but not least we took a look at a slower 4X Ritek RW. As you can expect, the results are not surprising and the SH-16A7S had no problems.
The CD-DVD Write was almost flawless. There was a tiny blip at the 1.75 GB mark, nothing to be concerned about.
The DVD-RW had a terrible disc quality score, only 45, and a consistently high PI Error and Failure count.
However, this performance did not prevent it from receiving a perfect scan.
As for Kprobe, the results are the consistent with what's seen through the eyes of CD-DVD Speed.
After putting the SH-16A7S through a series of tests, both captured in this review, and done on my own for backing up purposes, the performance has been flawless. I've yet to coaster a single DVD.
You may be wondering why I didn't test the CD speed of this drive, the answer is simply because I don't have any and the technology is so dated that it wouldn't provide a very meaningful benchmark. I tried reading a few of my old music CDs, some slightly scratched, and the drive worked perfectly. There was no skipping of any sorts.
When it comes to the noise level, the drive spins up somewhat louder than some of the optical drives I've owned. At maximum speed, it's most certainly louder than my 16X Plextor IDE. Many users have reported similar problems and perhaps Lite-On should look into some form of vibration dampening system.
Head over to the next page where I wrap everything up.
Page 8 : Conclusion
When the burning was all said and done, there's not a whole lot you can complain about with the Lite-On SH-16A7S. Lite-On has packaged another simple drive at a very affordable cost for the end users.
The SH-16A7S replaces the large bulky 40-pin flat IDE ribbon with a slim SATA cable and this small but important change helps put Lite-On above the rest of its competitors. IDE is slowly disappearing and the way of the future is SATA, not only because it's faster, but because cable managers will love its flexibility and ease of reconfigurability.
The SH-16A7S shone in all its tests achieving maximum speed with ease. I have personally burned a dozen video files and data backup discs in addition to the tests performed in this review; I didn't get a single coaster and there were no problems reading any of the files on my other computers and standalone DVD player.
The Lite-On SH-16A7S is reasonably priced at $32 for the OEM and $39 for the retail. With other SATA optical drives sometimes doubling that price, it becomes a great buy if you can find it.
Advantages
⢠Affordable for SATA DVD±RW
⢠SATA interface reduces in-case clutter
⢠Error free performance
Disadvantages
⢠Somewhat noisy operation
⢠Difficult to find
Overclockers Online would like to thank Lite-On for making this review possible.
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