LG GCC-5241P external combo drive review @ CDRLabs.com

On the road or at home, the GCC-5241P is a great choice for anyone looking for a compact and versatile combo drive. Surprisingly, LG's engineers haven't traded much for size. The GCC-5241P offers the same level of performance and features we've come to expect from LG's desktop drives.

With the GCC-5241P offering some of the fastest reading and writing speeds available on a portable drive, it shouldn't be surprising that it did well in our tests. The drive was able to read pressed and CD-R media at speeds as high as 24x and CD-RW discs at a respectable 20x. LG's new drive also had some pretty good seek times with all types of media. The GCC-5241P did better than I expected in our DAE tests. The drive had no problems ripping audio CD's at 20x. Unfortunately, it did have its share of problems when reading scratched discs.

LG's new combo drive also performed well in our writing tests. Thanks to its 24x writing speeds, the GCC-5241P took less than six minutes to write an entire 80 minute CD. More importantly, its writing quality was very good. The GCC-5241P also turned in some pretty good times in our rewriting tests, but wasn't as fast as the Lite-On LSC-24081MX and its 12x rewriting speeds.

Of course, the whole point of getting a combo drive is to read DVD's. Here too, the GCC-5241P performed pretty well. The drive had no problems reading data DVD-ROM's at 8x, but had to slow down to 4x to read DVD videos and recordable DVD media. Just keep in mind that while the GCC-5241P supports DVD-R/RW and DVD+RW media, DVD+R discs are not supported. Hopefully LG can change this in a future firmware update.