The eTAU 208 is a slim and lightweight portable DVD writer, mainly aimed at all those who own a netbook/laptop that lack of a DVD drive. Its small size and low weight help carrying it around without much effort, as it can fit in most of the laptop carrying bags that have a small amount of space free. Its USB-powered feature helps even more, as you don't need to be sitting near an AC plug in order to use it. Just plug it into the PC (two USB plugs - one for the data and one for the power) and you can start using it immediately, with only a cost on your laptop's battery.

The reading aspect of the drive, to begin with, proved to be mediocre. We were really confused with the drive's behavior when it comes to reading of dual-layered DVDs, including recordable and read only (ROM) discs. The drive gave some read errors as it was accessing the end of the layer 0 of the disc, as well as it was trying to switch to the second layer. The laser pick-up was immediately re-focusing on the deeper second layer and reading was resumed in most cases, but these read errors could mean an   interrupted playback in case of DVD Video discs. In addition, both of the benchmark utilities we used for testing the reading performance of the drive (Opti Drive Control and Nero Disc Speed) could not measure the seek times of the drive with DVD9 media, returning errors. An explanation would be that the laser pickup could not accurately follow the software's commands for a random access to the disc.

The reading speed was good and the drive read every media according to its specifications. As far as reading defected CD and DVD media, we can say that the drive handled them not as well as we would expect. Average performance with the defected CDs and read errors were produced on the most of the ABEX defected DVD test discs.

Moving on to the drive's writing performance, the drive burned successfully all MIDs according to its specifications, except from the DVD+R DL (MKM003) disc, which was burned at 4x. The writing quality was great with almost all the DVD-R/+R and CD-R media we used in this test. However, the drive seems to need some work when burning DVD-R/+R DL media.

Last but not least, the support for Book type and overburning with CD-R discs could offer greater compatibility for your discs as well as worry-free burning of large files on your CD-Rs. We would like to see the drive support overburning with DVDs too.

The LiteOn eTAU 108 drive can be purchased online for about €50.

Pros

• Ultra portable and stylish CD/DVD burner
• USB- powered
• Great writing quality with DVD+R/-R/+RW and CD-R media
• Reads/writes DVD-RAM (5x)
• Supports Book type with DVD+R/+R DL and DVD+RW discs
• Supports overburning with CD-R discs

Cons

• Generally unstable reading of DVD9 discs (DVD-ROM DL and DVD+R/-R DL)
• Average handling of defected CD-Rs
• Weak error correction with defected DVDs
• Questionable writing quality with DVD+R DL /-R DL and DVD-RW discs
• No overburning with DVD recordables