LG WH08LS20

LG Electronics LGE WH08LS20 Blu-ray Burner

The LG WH08LS20 is a nice Blu-ray burner with great software, but its CD/DVD performance is a tad off. Blu-ray is on the road to becoming mainstream, if LG's WH08LS20 internal SATA-interface burner is any indication. My experience with it was sublime; the drive functioned smoothly, and came with all the software I needed to burn any disc I wanted, including Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, and CDs. One thing I particularly liked about the WH08LS20 was the shorter-than-normal lag when identifying discs. If you've ever had to wait 10 or 15 seconds for Explorer to refresh when you stick a disc in a drive, you know the phenomenon of which I speak. In Blu-ray speeds and feeds, the WH08LS20 is state of the art. It writes single- and double-layer BD-R at 8X, handles BD-RE at 2X, and reads BD-ROM at 8X. In my hands-on tests, it wrote to all of those media types at the rated speeds, and movie playback was silky smooth, with no stutters or hiccups. With DVD, the drive is fast, but less so, writing DVD+/-R at 8X, DVD+RW at 8X, DVD-RW at 6X, DVD-RAM at 5X, and DVD+/-R DL at 6X; it reads all those formats at 8X. CD read/write speeds are 24X across the board--more than fast enough for most users, but half what you'll find on drives like Matshita's SW5584 (a model that sometimes resides inside other vendors' products, such as the Buffalo BR-816SU2).