Pulled this from another thread:
"People around here have very short memories...
Until a few months ago, Lite-On was considered doggie dung. They
were viewed, correctly, as a very low cost producer of unreliable
CDroms. Short term failure rates were high. Quality was low. Performance
was middling.
All that has happened since then, as far as I can tell, is that
now they are producing cheap BURNERS and offer a feature set that
allows people to circumvent copy protection methods (e.g. Safedisc 2).
Mentality now: It is the cheapest, it allows me to copy my "backups"
and it works great out of the box, so it is great and let's all join
in on the mantra: Lite-on Rulz!
But I know people in the industry and they say the failure rate on
these Lite-On drives--including the newest ones--is spectacularly high.
They may not fail out of the box, but give them 6 months or a year.
I talked to one person who does independent QA as a consultant to just
about every CDrom/CDRW/DVDrom manufacturer in the world (there aren't
many, of course), and he told me that his observations are that
Lite-On is just a problem waiting to happen. In fact, what he told
me is that (paraphrasing) "I really don't see much difference in quality
among the more expensive producers--Plextor, Teac, Sanyo, Sony--but
the lowest cost producers, like Lite-On are really MUCH worse." He
doesn't work for any of these companies, but he deals with all of them
and his job is to evaluate their products...Take it for what you will."
I had a 40x CD-Rom that failied shortly after I purchased it. Got an RMA and got another one that didn't work out of the box.
Glad I got the Mitsumi.