Megatron was degene die ons op de hoogte stelde van deze roundup van 16 speed DVD-ROM drives, geschreven door de altijd even deskundige mensen van CDR-Info. Het gaat om modellen van AOpen, LiteOn en Matsushita/Panasonic, die allen tevens in staat zijn met 48-voudige snelheid normale CD-ROM schijfjes te lezen. Met behulp van software als SCSI Mechanic en Nero CD Speed worden getest met het lezen van verschillende media zoals CD, CD-R en PSX. Daarna test men de mogelijkheden van de deelnemers om verschillende kopieëerbeveiligingen te lezen. Ook beoordeelt de tester de DAE prestaties en het lezen van 99 minuten schijfjes. Last but not least is de DVD snelheid aan de beurt. Al met al komt de LiteOn het beste uit te test:
If you are looking for the best price/performance combo then the LiteOn LTD163 seems to be the ultimate solution for you. It is beyond any doubt the fastest of the the three tested drives in both CD/DVD formats, and has a high DAE ripping speed which comes in pretty handy for cooperating with your 20x/24x ultra high speed recorder. The noise levels are a bit high, and a drawback which might disappoint the user is the low reading performance with mode2 (PSX) CDs.
The AOpen 1648 is a safe buy and its region free status and noiseless operation will be greatly appreciated by all users. CloneCD fanatics will not like the drive, since it doesn't read SubChannel data and skips errors very slowly.
Lastly the Matsushita SR8586 seems to be an interesting alternative solution, but only if certain features, such as DAE quality/speed, are to be improved on a future firmware revision. The drive does have the fastest seek times around and reads PSX CDs as fast as hell. Last it supports reading of SubChannel data.