Since last Friday we can find a review of the CenDyne Lightning V 52/24/52 drive over at our friends from CDRLabs.com. The CenDyne drive is based on Lite-On's latest writer, the LTR-52246S:
 It shouldn't be surprising that CenDyne was one of the first companies to ship a 52x writer. Based on the LTR-52246S from Lite-On, the Lightning V is CenDyne's fastest writer to date. The drive reads and writes at 52x, rewrites at 24x and does DAE at a whopping 48x. Of course, CenDyne's new drive isn't just about speed. The Lightning V also offers features like SMART-BURN buffer underrun protection, SMART-X extraction monitoring technology and support for the Mt. Rainier format. CenDyne's new drive also includes everything you need to begin recording right away, like a software CD with Ahead Software's Nero Burning Rom, CD-R media and IDE and audio cables. |
Part of the Conclusion:
The question for many is whether or not it's worth upgrading from a 48x writer to a 52x writer. While the difference in writing speeds may not seem like much, the Lightning was noticeably faster than most of the 48x writers we've looked at. The drive's media compatibility is also very good. In our writing tests we found that CenDyne's new drive was able to write at 52x to a variety of media while keeping the writing errors to a minimum. The Lightning V also had some very good transfer speeds and seek times when reading data CD's, but like some of the other Lite-On based writers we've tested, it had some higher than normal CPU usage. The Lightning's DAE speeds were also very good. While the drive wasn't able to rip audio CD's at 52x, it had no problems ripping them at 48x in our tests.
If you're interested in reading the complete review then check it out here. The CenDyne/Lite-On drive gets an overall impressive score of 9.
Source: CDRLabs.com
