A Closer Look At The Drive

The Lite-On 16x10x40x BURN-Proof drive looks exactly like its 12x10x32x sibling. The only visible difference is the 16x10x40x label in front of the drive. (Editor : Hmm... I wonder if you can flash the 12x10x32x to 16x10x40x... Heheh...)

Physically, the Lite-On 16x10x40x BURN-Proof drive looks pretty much like every other CD-RW drive. It sports everything that you would expect from any other CD-RW drive. There's the basic stereo headphone output jack for CD audio along with its volume control and the status LED.

Ah... The tray also sports the liteonit.com.tw sticker, which is the website address of Lite-On's IT division.

A look at the top of the drive reveals something that could be quite peculiar to some users. As you can see from the picture below, the top of the drive unit shows an elevated circle in the exact position where the CD holding mechanism would be.

According to the Lite-On distributor here in KL, the elevation was added to accommodate the ball-bearing mechanism that is used in most of the latest Lite-On drives. Ball bearings were used to achieve better disc spinning stability.

BTW, don't be surprised if you hear loud, weird whirling when the drive is spinning up. It's simply due to the use of ball bearings.

Ah... here's the model number of the Lite-On 16x10x40x CD-Rewriter drive - the LTR-16101B. As you may conjecture, the 16 probably stands for the 16X CD-R writing speed while the 10 is for the 10x CD-RW writing speed.

A look at the back of the drive reveals an interesting detail. The drive seems to have undocumented pins beside the CD-Audio port. Most probably, these pins are used for internal QA testing purposes.

Well, enough of the external examination of this drive. Let's get on with the technical specifications of the drive, shall we?