LiteOn SSM-85H5SX > Reviews > Read, write and draw what more do you need?

Author's product rating:   

Reliability	Excellent
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Lightweight, small, portable and has lightsribe technology .
Disadvantages:	Quite expensive £70, not the fastest drive around

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Quite recently I decided I was going to start to upgrade my computer get a few extra components, a couple of toys etc. So I looked at my bank account decided what I had to spend and went shopping. At the top of my list was a new CD/DVD RW drive that I could use in both my pc and laptop and could carry about with me easily with my laptop. So I wanted a lightweight, small, USB external drive. I started looking and found just what I was looking for and as an added bonus it had one very cool extra feature. It was the Liteon SSM-85H5SX. The added extra was the Lightscribe technology meaning I can design an image and then burn it onto the top side of a specially made disk.

SPECIFICATIONS

This is just a list of read, write and rewrite speeds. The complicated way to explain this is to say that the first CD drive read a 150 Kbps (kilobits per second) and this is X so 2X is 2 times as fast (300 kbps) as just X, 3X is 3 times as fast (450 kbps) and so on. This is in bits though and nowadays we work in bytes, there are 8 bits in a byte so this means that to find out how long it should take to burn a full CD (700 megabytes) you find out how many kilobits you have (1024 KB = 1MB) and then diving it by your speed and that is how long in seconds you should be able to write at. Just remember though that you usually won't run at the maximum speed that is possible. I'm sorry if I lost you completely there but to put it simply, the bigger the number the faster it is.

DVD
Write: DVD+R 8X maximum / DVD+R DL 4X maximum / DVD-R 4X maximum / DVD-R DL 4X maximum
Rewrite: DVD+RW 8X maximum / DVD-RW 6X maximum / DVD-RAM 5X maximum
Read: DVD-ROM 8X maximum / DVD-RAM 5X maximum
CD
Write: CD-R 24X maximum
Rewrite: CD-RW 24X maximum
Read: CD-ROM 24X maximum

These are not the fastest speeds that you can get but they are still pretty fast for an external drive. I think one of the reasons it isn't super fast is because of its size and weight because it is a very small and lightweight drive so it does make up for it.

Size and Weight

Width 13.8 cm
Depth 15.5 cm
Height 2.4 cm
Weight 363 g

This makes it a very small and lightweight drive which is brilliant and I'm not sure if there is another one on the market for this sort of price tag and especially not another one with the Lightscribe technology.

Other information

The buffer size is 2MB but to be honest I am not really too sure on what this actually does but I thought I would mention it anyway because some of you may be interested in that.
It has fast access times for CD and DVDs with 110ms for a CD and 130ms for a DVD.
The minimum temperature this will work in is 5oC and the max is 35oC. I don't really care about those because at those temperatures I wouldn't be trying to use this drive but once again I thought I would just mention it anyway.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO USE?

It is very simple to use and pretty much every optical drive is. It does what it needs to when it is asked to and I haven't had any problems yet. I mainly use it for burning films onto DVD's and burning music onto CD's. I was also running out of space on my hard drive so I have a lot of my personal files on disk now as well. I use Nero to burn disks and I find it works brilliantly and never have problems with it either. I also use iTunes to burn mp3 CD's which is great but I rarely do that because I have my iPod to store my music on.
It comes with a power adapter which I barely use because it can just run off of power from the USB port but read and write speeds do suffer because of this. It being able to run without the power adapter also makes it extra portable so once again another pro to add onto the list.

LIGHTSCRIBE

Now this is why it caught my eye in the first place. This technology is pretty cool because it uses the laser that writes onto the disk to then "draw" onto the top side of special disks by you just flipping the disk over. I personally don't know all the technicalities of this but I do know it is a nice wee toy. It can only do monochromatic (black and white) images right now but in time new drives will be able to do full colour. Black and white is ok for me right now because I really just use it to play about with and it is a lot neater than using a black marker pen or the special disk pens to label disks as well. There are other options for this like buying labels that can be stuck onto disks but this does look cheap and quite nasty so I wouldn't advise that, there are also disks that can be directly printed onto and my printer does actually do that but one thing I don't like about it is that the colours look washed and faded. All these options add extra cost onto the final product. I am not too sure how much the printable disks actually cost but I think it would be cheaper that the Lightscribe disks. The Lightscribe disks cost very roughly about twice as expensive as normal disks (about 20p for a Lightscribe CD and 40p for a Lightscribe DVD) but I think prices will drop soon. There is a sort of paint application built into Nero for this so you can make pretty professional looking disks in the end and it doesn't actually come at a huge expense.

IS IT WORTH IT?

This drive is definitely worth the £70 I paid for it and I am glad I did get it. It is very portable, lightweight and as an added extra it has this Lightscribe technology as well. If you are looking for these three things then get this because it is definitely worth it. I hope I didn't confuse you at any point during this with any fancy technological stuff but I have tried to reword it so it isn't complicated.
Thanks for reading and please comment to tell me what you think of this review and feel free to ask questions about the drive itself.