Lite-On iHBS112 12X Blu-ray Disc Writer
Aug 26th, 2010 | By SimonInstallation is quite simple as with any optical drive. To remove an optical drive, you must unscrew the four screws holding the existing optical drive to your chassis, unplug the SATA power and data cable and pull it out. To install, just follow the steps in reverse. The first thing to do is slide the optical drive into your drive bay, plug in the SATA data and power cable and secure the drive to your chassis with a few screws. Once you’ve got the unit in, boot up your PC and Windows will take care of the rest.
You will need to supply your own media making software if you’re not content with the included CyberLink applications. For testing, I installed the Lite-On iHBS112 to my day-to-day Q6600 machine and filled a bunch of blank media discs using Nero CD-DVD Speed v4.7.7.16 and CyberLink’s Power2Go software. So before we begin, here are a few screenshots of what the CyberLink Blu-ray Disc Suite has to offer.
I first tested the drive with some Verbatim DVD-R rated at 16x.
We easily achieved the Lite-On’s iHBS112′s maximum write speed of 16x. The increase in speed wasn’t exactly the smoothest curve but the drive did exactly as it said it would. The read speed produced a very clean curve. CPU usage reached a maximum of 29%. The quality scores was in the mid 90s for all three test discs that I used and the surface scan was always perfect.
Next up for testing we have some Maxell CD-Rs rated at 48x. I know CDs are pretty dated but every once in a while they still come in handy. This past weekend I actually made 6 CDs for a 1500 km roadtrip where I wouldn’t have radio reception.
If you purchased the iHBS112 then you’re likely only interested in the next 2 sections: Blu-ray read and write performance. To start, I grabbed a copy of The Mummy which was 33.36 GB BD-ROM DL. The maximum 8X read speed was easily achieved by the halfway point of the disc. The overall CPU usage was minimal as were the access times.
Our last test will be to evaluate the BD-R SL write performance. My choice of media was the Sony’s BNR25R3H discs. The label only states 6x speed but if you view the disc info in CD-DVD Speed v4.7.7.16 it shows 12x compatibility.
I had some issues using CD-DVD Speed to reach the listed 12x write speed as every time I ran the benchmark it would plateau at 3.5x. The result was the same whether I tried Windows Vista, Windows 7 or if I had the drive on IDE mode of AHCI. The problem is with CD-DVD Speed and not the burner itself. When manually creating a 25GB data disc (23,864MB of the 23,866MB available) with CyberLink’s Power2Go I completed the job in 11 minutes and 45 seconds at 12x. There’s no curve to indicate the speed at each MB written but the point can be made that this drive writes at 12x without any issues. The bigger problem you’re going to have to solve is how to get 12x media for cheap! Each Sony disc will set you back 12 to 13 dollars and that means after 15 discs you will have paid more in media than for the drive itself!
Going back to CD-DVD Speed I benchmarked the read performance again using the CD-DVD Speed disc and found it too had a maximum read speed of 8x with low CPU usage and reasonable access time. The surface scan showed that the burn was flawless despite a relatively low disc quality (score of only 38).
Overall, the key message has been delivered. The iHBS112 can deliver 12x write speed on compatible media allowing you to storage massive amounts of data in very little space.