LITE-ON 22X DVD±R DVD Burner 22X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 22X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM Black IDE Model iHAP222-06 LightScribe Support - OEM

Pros: Cheap

I've owned this drive 8 months, and after making lots of coasters I panned it in my first review. However, I recently did some research and corrected some boneheaded mistakes. My drive hasn't made a coaster since.

Cons: N/A.

My problem wasn't firmware, drivers, or a manufacturing defect: the drive was fine, t simply wasn't receiving data fast enough.

I'm no expert, but here's some tips. Ensure:

1. Your IDE cable/s are 80-pin; 40-pin cables don't support DMA. This was my biggest problem.
2. You don't have DMA disabled in the BIOS.
3. Your IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers are set to "DMA if available" in control panel.

Overall Review: (cont'd)
4. Your hard drive and ihap222 are on different channels. Try mastering the hard drive on 1, and mastering the DVD on 2.
5. Test your transfer speed. I used "Nero CD-DVD Speed" (free program). You'll need a mostly-full disc without copy protection to test-scan. Google your top speed to see if it's consistent with DMA-enabled transfers.
6. First burn your files to an ISO image, so they're contiguous on the hard drive and can be read faster.
7. Try burning with "InfraRecorderPortable" (a free, open-source program). Try a sub-maximum speed. My current settings: 14x speed, Session-At-Once, buffer underrun protection, pad data tracks, close the disc after writing. I've got everything on the "advanced" tab unchecked.

NOTE: My drive still doesn't recognize the discs it burns; I dunno why. I likely still have something configured wrong. My other computer reads them fine, however.

Hope this helps somebody :)

Pros: It's a typical LiteON drive. It worked flawlessly on an older IDE-based Dell computer for about four months.

Cons: Four months later, and in a period of only a few days, it began to stop recognizing disks, both CDs and DVDs. Then I tried to burn both a CD, then a DVD, and both were no-go.

Overall Review: This is the first time I've ever had an optical drive fail on me. I've never had problems with LiteONs before, so I'm going to overlook this one and give it 2 stars for the fact that it did work well, for a while. [shrug]