There are some very fast CD burners on the market although they're mainly being overtaken by DVD burners which aren't much more expensive these days. The LG GCE-8160B is a couple of years old now and used to sell at PC World for £69 but can be picked up cheaply on eBay these days.

Installation was excellent. Both Windows 98 and XP spotted the drive with no problems and the software was up and running in minutes. A refreshingly trouble free experience.

As well as sporting a 16/10/40 set of speeds, the unit uses LG's version of Burnproof called Super-Link. This feature ought to eliminate the dreaded buffer under-run problem that used to plague CD burners. The result is you should never have a burn fail if your PC can't keep up the flow of data to the burner. I tried firing up numerous programs and running some disk intensive jobs during burns with no ill effects, the data read back fine afterwards.

The front panel contains the usual pair of next track/eject buttons as well as a headphones jack and volume control. A pair of LEDs show red when reading and green when burning which seemed back to front to me.

This is where the drive truly starts to shine. All too often you see a printer rated at 10 pages a minute that actually churns stuff out at a more leisurely four or five. Equally, it is rare for a CD Burner to go as quick as it claims. Not in this case. When it came to reading, I actually got slightly better than the 40X quoted. More amazingly, it managed to do DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) at this speed, a task which few drives manage at anywhere near their rated speed. This speeds up copying data from music CDs enormously when making compilation CDs. The read speed dropped when reading CD-RW disks but was still very good.

I mentioned earlier about using this drive for backing up CDs. A common method for protecting CDs, particularly games is SafeDisk2. To backup SD2 protected titles you need a drive capable of appropriate subchannel data reading and writing. This drive comes in two variants, the CED-8160 for the US markets and the GCE-8160 for elsewhere. It has been reported that only Korean models of the GCE version supports the required subchannel features. However, drives sold in Canada have also been found to have this feature so it's reasonable to assume that all GCE units can do this. Furthermore, the CloneCD web site ( www.elby.org/CloneCD/english/cdr_l.htm ) lists the GCE-8160B as being able to read RAW-DAO 96 and write RAW+96 which translates as all subchannel types. I didn't have the appropriate software to test this myself but it is worth bearing in mind as a probable feature in UK models.