Lite-On Blu-ray Writer iHBS212

Full Review

Those who remember the heady days when DVD writers were in the ascendancy may recall a time of constant flux. Every month seemed to bring an ever-faster model that instantly rendered the former champions as distinctly old-hat.

It's fair to say that the Blu-ray writer market has evolved at a rather more glacial rate. Twelve-speed models are finally beginning to hit the shops. But even these 12-speed drives aren't getting close to their full potential. The problem is the usual one, of blank media - we now have six-speed BD-R discs available, but that's still only half the speed of the fastest drives.

This drive did burn our 22GB of test data in under 15 minutes - but only just. The time of 14 minutes and 52 seconds was barely faster than the 15 minutes and 4 seconds registered by a 10x specified LG drive using 4x media to test it. When we used a lower-grade 4x BD-R disc to burn 22890 MB using Nero, the burn completed in 49 minutes, with a disc-write verification time of 16 minutes. On such a disc, the write speed was effectively 1.73x and read speed was 5.3x (1x for a Blu-Ray disc is 4.5 Mbytes/sec).

We're yet to see a drive push BD-RE media (rewriteable Blu-ray) beyond two-speed. Nor did the Lite-On manage to cross the 2x point. Nonetheless, the Lite-On is the fastest drive we've seen yet in real-world terms, so it deserves recognition for that.

We looked at the Lite-On iHBS212. This is the fully boxed retail version, and comes with complete packaging and software. LightScribe is supported, though this pleasing but limited labelling technology has never really been developed to its full capability. But for anyone who might want to apply non-colour images directly to their media, the iHBS212 drive may offer value, with slightly more expensive blank discs.


The bundled software consists of the usual CyberLink Blu-ray Suite. CyberLink appears to have got the BD software corner sewn up, with a nice selection of applications - from the authoring package, PowerProducer, to the PowerDVD playback program and the Power2Go burning software.

We found Blu-ray film playback to be very good on this drive. The 8MB buffer size on the Lite-On is ample, and the support for a range of different drive formats even stretches to 12-speed DVD-RAM.

Bottom Line

The Lite-On iHBS212 may not be a huge step forwards in terms of raw speed, but it'™s still the fastest Blu-ray drive we've seen yet. Given that it ticks the boxes in every other area, and will cost an acceptable Rs. 7450 for the retail pack with LightScribe, that makes this Lite-On the best internal BD drive currently available.