LiteOn eNAU608

Lite-On eNAU608

It's nearly impossible to make a DVD burner stand out from the pack these days, but Lite-On comes close with its portable eNAU608 USB 2.0 burner. The unit is small and light, and supports personalization via a graphics insert on the top of the drive. Even better, the drive supports both LightScribe and LabelTag--two laser-etching technologies that let you label your discs without resorting to cumbersome, unbalancing labels or a disc printer. (Lite-On's recent full-size burner, the IHAS524-T98, supports LabelTag but not LightScribe.) LightScribe requires special media, but LabelTag works on the data side of any recordable DVD or CD. LabelTag does reduce the capacity of the disc, as it uses the dye area to do its inscribing; nevertheless, it's useful for people with lousy handwriting (such as yours truly). You probably won't fill a disc to capacity anyway, unless you're using it to create a backup. In other respects, the eNAU608 is a garden-variety drive with middling speed (its rated speed is comparable to that of other portable drives, but portables can't match the performance of full-size optical drives) and wide format support (CD, DVD+/-RW, DL, and RAM).