Lite-On SOHW-1633S DVD±RW Drive

Comments:
I bought this drive from Circuit City in Oct 2004. Within a few months it would not read or write to any CD/CD-R. Still burns/reads DVD tho, but it will only burn at 8x and not at 16x like it's supposed to.
For months I figured I had messed something up, then after my 1 year warranty expired I found posts on the internet from people with the same problem... lots of them. Now I am stuck with no recourse. Do not buy this drive; it's a testimony to the poor customer service of the company that doesn't answer their tech support yet continues to sell these known faulty drives to the unaware consumer. If you buy this you will almost certainly be returning it within the year. Wish I could... sniff

Comments:
I bought a 1633S on Thurday. By Sunday it was dead. This is the second Lite-On drive that has died prematurely on me.

Aside from making very poor quality devices, Lite On includes only Nero software with their DVD drives. Plextor and others include Roxio, which is vastly superior ro Nero's buggly, slow and unintuitive software.

Comments:
Optical drives from LITE-ON are popularly known for their extremely short drive length and decent performance under most usage conditions. Apart from its 8x DVD-R write speed, the SOHW-1633S was able to perform quite well in most of our tests....

Comments:
alaTest collected and analysed 3 reviews of LiteOn SOHW-1633S from international magazines and websites and compared these to 12970 reviews for other CD & DVD Drives....