Lite-On SOHW-1693S

I love this writer !! I had it in my workplace very hard worker proof !!

What can you say about a DVD drive? I installed the Lite-On SOHW-1693S DVD drive into my 1.7 GHz P4/Gigabyte GA-8IE motherboard PC, and it always wrote to CD-RW and CD-R blanks at full speed, but months later when I bought a spindle of cheap 8x DVD-R discs and tried to write to them at full speed, every one of about half a dozen I tried failed Nero's data verification test. It was OK at 4x speed. However, it wrote to Imation 4x DVD-RW discs perfectly OK. I downloaded new firmware for it from the Lite-On website in the hope that updating it would help. Every single time I tried to run the firmware updater program, it totally locked up my PC, forcing me to hit the reset button to restart it. I wasted a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to make it work in safe mode etc. Finally I removed this drive from my home PC and installed it in my work one. The firmware updater worked perfectly on it. However, I haven't yet tested the drive with the 8x DVD-R discs to see if it will write to them properly.

I bought and installed a Pioneer DVR-110D in my home PC, and it happily reads and writes all discs, including those 8x DVD-R ones without a hint of a problem.

There are a lot of DVD drives on the market. You don't have to get a Lite-On one. I recommend that you don't.