LiteOn IHAS324-32 24x DVD-RW Internal SATA Drive / Black

This is a retail pack of the above drive (comes with screws, sata cable and OEM Nero 7, which is not Win7 compatible), a SATA version without Lightscribe. It's fast, quiet, and does a pretty good job. There are utilities to download that allow you to change bitsetting, booktype, RPC codes. You can also change the way the drive learns and writes discs, and set overspeeds.

One of the interesting features is it's ability to wipe discs (SmartErase) - any old information can be destroyed by burning out the data track before you chuck it away.

The only reason for losing a star is that the drive has a tendency to sacrifice burn quality for speed, especially at the initial (slowest) parts of a burn. Using diagnostic software, you can see higher levels of PIE at the beginning, but this won't be a problem if you're reading back on halfway decent, modern drives, or spending extra cash on very good discs. If you have an older DVD player, it might be temperamental with this where it's expected to read disc quality stretched to the limit.

Also, the price seems to fluctuate quite a lot, so make sure you buy at the cheaper end of the scale where it's a complete bargain, rather than at the more expensive price where you pay a third more.

Hey folks, I purchased this DVD-RW drive a couple of months back from another site ( I would have purchased from play but there was not enough information on this product whether if it is OEM or retail version)?

The drive I purchased came in a retail package with the screws, 1 sata cable and Nero 8 essentials CD. If this product here on play is the OEM version, then you will only get the drive without any cables, screws or software.

Installation was a piece of cake, plugged it in and my PC picked it up straight away (I was using win XP sp3 at the time but now have upgraded to win 7 64bit OS and so far everything is sweet).

I have so far burnt a lot of DVD+R discs and CD-r discs and I can confirm that this drive is pretty fast when burning large amounts of data. This drive is also very silent and I hardly hear any vibration sounds or the the discs/DVD s spinning violently.

The drive is quite solid and doesn't feel cheap at all.

For me I burn a lot of DVD, ISO files and video files such as photo slide shows etc... and the speed rate is good i.e. I recently burnt a photo slide show which was 146 minutes long and had nearly 4gb's of data in less than 9 minutes at maximum speeds.

DVD to DVD burning is around or less than 4-5 minutes at max speeds. CD-r depending on file size i.e. 699mb would burn within 2-3 minutes.

overall this drive is serving its purpose very well and I would definitely recommend this drive to anyone looking for a decent burner for a great price.

5*****