* 06/09/2005 Review Updated

A more recent patched version of the fw FS09 has been released. The drive can read up to 16X all DVD SL formats and DVD-ROM DL, while for rest of the DL it supports 12X.

Firstly select the patcher utility, namely 16P9S.FS09.patcher, in order to adjust the firmware to your own needs.

You can set the speed for each format seperately depending on the available speeds provided by the utility. We set them all to maximum speed.

Now the 16P9S.FS09.patched firmware has been created and it is ready for use. Run it to flash the drive...

Now the patched firmware has been installed and we can start the reading tests. The rest of the drives, presented in the following graphs, have their official firmwares installed and are all the same as in the rest of the review, apart from the Asus which is the latest one, more recent than the DVD-E616P2 used in previous pages.

There is no reason for comments as the graphs speak for themselves. The patced firmware made the drive extremely fast, as a matter of fact it reached its limits. However, if you observe the complete CD-DVD Speed Graphs, you'll notice that sometimes, especially with the RW discs, the drive had to slow down for a while.

- Nero CD-DVD Speed Graphs

DVD Pressed SL
DVD Pressed DL PTP
DVD Pressed DL OTP
DVD-R
DVD-RW
DVD+R
DVD+RW

It would be rather interesting to see what the error correction of the drive at such high speeds would be..

The error correction is not as effective as with the official firmware, but this is something we should expect since the reading speed has been doubled, from 8X to 16X. Even at such a high speed the readings were completed successfully, in spite of the fact that the spped dropped at times.

Since the patcher allows you to define the speed at 8, 10, 12, 14 and 16X, you can reduce it to 14X or even 12X and reflash the drive, in case you come up with any problems at 16X regarding specific media.

One thing we noticed is that everytime we flashed the drive with the patched firmware, the region count was reset to 5. That was good...

So, it seems that for the time being the LiteOn SOHD-16P9S could be no less than the perfect purchase.