For anyone with a near encyclopaedic knowledge of late 1980s dance/pop music, the allusion to Black Box (featuring Nicki Harris I believe...) in the title would be child’s play. I was sceptical about buying a LiteOn CD Burner, especially one which claims to be 24 speed writing speed, as I have always gone for names I could trust (e.g. Hewlett Packard, Yamaha). However a glance through Geizhals.at showed that this 24 speed burner could be mine for ATS 1688 (that’s £76.72) and with my HP Burner having been bought just prior to the era of Burn-proof burners (these eliminate the scourge of many a users’ life – Buffer Underrun), and that being the cheapest price in the country by close to a tenner, and with the shop a three minute work from where I live, then of course there was no hope but to buy this burner.
Having installed many burners and so on in my time, the installation was a doddle, and all I had to do was attach it to my secondary IDE port, where my previous burner was and attach a few cables and it was ready to go. The retail version includes, to help with the installation, a cable to connect the writer to your sound card, but no secondary IDE cable (the HP did include one), so check your machine before you buy to check that you have one, otherwise you will have to add an extra IDE ribbon cable (a normal 40 pin UDMA-33 compatible ribbon cable is the one you want). There are screws for mounting the drive (in a spare 5.25” bay as if it needs mentioning!). Obviously you may have to change the jumper cap (initially set to slave) if you want to run the drive as the secondary master device.
Then fire-up your computer and let the BIOS recognise the latest addition (don’t be perturbed if at first it is described as a CD Rom drive rather than a writer. The bundled software, Nero 5 (my version was 5.5.30) and In CD (packet writing software and similar to Direct CD) are easy to install and once there are installed then you are ready to burn, apart from one recommended tweak to the system settings. It is mentioned on the installation sheet (not quite like the manual and video CD that HP offered but then again, who really needs that, as you can get a friend to fit it if you can’t!) although only by allusion. What you should do is:
1) Open System Settings 2) Select System 3) Select the tab “Device Manager” 4) Select the drive from the CD Drives (the only one there in some cases – otherwise obviously click on the correct name) list 5) Click on properties 6) Select the tab “Settings” 7) Select DMA (i.e. put a tick in the box if it is unselected) 8) Close the various windows using “OK” in each instance.
The Nero software is easy to use, and would cost about £35 if sold separately. I would advise removing all CD writing software you have installed (especially Adaptec/Roxio DirectCD) as having more than one piece of burning software installed can cause problems when writing. Before writing my first CD I did check the website (www.liteonit.com.tw) for any firmware patches, although with my drive being only manufactured in late November 2001, according to the box and the drive case, there were no updates necessary. Typically though a firmware update is about 300-400k in compressed zip form – expanded it was about 900k. Before getting burn crazy – run the Nero utilities that come with the drive, (Nero CD Speed and Nero Drivespeed), in order to get the drive calibrated and then open Nero. There are a host of options in Nero, but it should all be quite simple – I won’t tell you how to do it all – this is not a Nero op after all! The media supplied with the drive is the correct speed (I have seen slow media supplied with a burner before now – eg. 12x max writing speed for the CD media and a 16x writer). Of course when buying Media for the drive you should also ensure that the Media is compatible with write speeds of 16x and 24x (otherwise you are advised to turn the speed down on your burner). For music CDs I would always advise a slower write speed (max 8x) as some CD players n be a bit fussy about what CDs they’ll read.
My first test for the burner was to create a Data CD – ca. 600Mb from the hard-drive (this is going to be the typical workload for the computer) and this took 6:16 including 1:30 for data caching – but was only this long because I had used a slower CD 16x compatible, which the drive had recognised. As a tip to avoid any problems don’t run lots of apps in the background when burning, admitted it is not such a problem as it used to be with the earlier burners but for the quicker burn speeds it is still worth heeding. Having linked up another CD drive to read the data to back-up a CD, I then saw the burner really fly although on the fly burning is not advisable with scratched original CDs.
The burner will work with any PC faster than 166Mhz (i.e. late Pentium Pro or above) with minimum 32Mb RAM and a minimum 100Mb Hard Disk Space – although I would recommend at least 1Gb free hard-drive space so that you can do a disk image. All in all this is a very good low price burner, and well worth the cash – especially after you have got fed up of waiting for new HP Burner firmware to arrive.
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