The external DVD recorders' market is really exigent and competitive. All product manufacturers struggle to offer the best reading quality and fastest burning speed with their drives. In the past years, we have witnessed the release of various drives, from poor quality ones to highly performant ones. Fortunately, in this case, as we have concluded in this review , we were dealing with an external drive far above average.

As most previous releases by LG, this drive appears to have an overall good error correction mechanism. Our DVD error correction tests confirm the drive's ability regarding this function. However, the CD format is something that we needs to be improved in further devices.

The LG-GSA5160D offered good CD and DVD ripping speeds, being an external drive. As it can clearly be noticed in the previous pages, the average speed, when ripping protected games, is satisfactory, but unfortunately, it can not create full working backups with the latest SafeDisc versions. However, with the EFM error correction enabled version, up to 2.9 can be backed up, which is a good performance in comparison to many other latest DVD burners.

As for the DVD writing quality, the 5160D demonstrated good results with most media used, with a few exceptions. DL media, burned at a speed of 2.4X with satisfactory results, especially with the Verbatim DL+R media.

The Booktype Setting with the DVD+R and +R DL media is also supported with this drive as we have seen in the previous page of this review, and this is a good improvement from LG since some of the previous versions of LG drives did not officially support this function.

With the Booktype and the DVD-Ram media, the drive rests among the best external DVD-Recorders, though another flaw can be found in the writing strategy with the DVD-RAM media, only because the drive uses the "write and verify" strategy, which reduces the writing speed but not the writing quality of the inserted media.

To conclude this review, we considered the drive's price, which is $120,VAT included. This is a decent price for such a good external device with all the competition on the market.

- The Positive Points

• Very Good DVD error correction
• Supports all types of media, including DVD-RAM media.
• Good CD writing quality
• Supports CD-Text (reading/writing)
• Can backup accurately up to v2.9x SD2 protected titles
• Can backup Audio protected discs
• Very good retail package

- The Negative Points

• CD error correction
• Reduced writing speed for DVD-RAM media (because of its write/verify function)
• Doesn't support Mount Rainier
• Cannot be used to measure CD/DVD media
• Does not support overburn

- Needs To Be Fixed

• Wider media support with all formats.

Retail Package
Reading
Error Correction
Protected Discs
Writing
Features