Brian_Igo's Full Review: LG GCE 8400B CD-RW Burner
This is it.
This time they really, really, REALLY mean it: 2003 is the final year in the reign of the CD drive. The computer magazines and online pundits insist we’ll soon toss aside our archaic CD-RW drives for DVD burners. All we need is for the industry to stop generating hype and finish off an absurd standards war. Getting someone to come up with a mass-market need for six gigabytes of removable storage would be handy, too and $400? Are you sure that’s not the price in pesos or dinars?
Don’t be fooled by the hype. The CD-RW drive is going to be around for a long, long time. But the pundits are half-right. While we’re not abandoning the drives, the engineers who design them are. The computer CD drive has reached the end of its developmental life. For starters, it’s taking a beating from the law of diminishing returns. Drives only read and write at top speed on the outside tracks of the disc. So an increase from 32x to 52x only saves at most a half-minute when reading or writing a full disc. There is also a small problem of unbalanced or defective CD’s exploding when they are spun at 10,000 RPM. Perhaps most importantly, since the market has overwhelmingly refused to buy any drive that costs more than $80 at Best Buy there is little incentive for drive makers to invest millions in research.
All these factors have combined to send the CD-RW into its golden years in a curious state. A drive that reads at 52x, burns CD-R’s at 48x and rewriteable discs at 20x, and costs $69.99 sounds like a miracle. They’re not. The speed has come with a huge increase in noise; a 48x or 52x drive can do a good impersonation of a jet engine. The fast burners are often finicky about the blank discs you feed them and thanks to the price wars, the reliability of most brands has dropped like a stone in recent years. Heavy users report a good drive is one that lasts two years.
Buying the fastest or cheapest CD-RW is easy. Finding the drive with the best combination of speed, price, refinement and quality is a tougher trick to pull off. The search led me to the LG 8400B.
The 8400B stands out first for not being a Lite-On drive. I should explain, most of the drives on the shelf at your local store (including many models from well known brands like Sony, TDK and Yamaha) are made by Lite-On or use their drive mechanisms. Lite-On deserves a lot of credit for bringing down the price of optical drives and they have been the most aggressive in pushing speeds ahead. But they are also the noisiest drives and have the worst reputation for longevity problems.
The drive mechanism in the 8400B is LG’s proprietary design and it’s a good one. For starters it is remarkably quiet. It makes much less noise than my trusty old Plextor 8x20 CD-R. I have to pay attention to hear it running over the two fans in my computer case. The comparison to a Lite-On 48x drive I recently installed in a friend’s system is almost beyond comparison. If you are looking for an unobtrusive replacement drive for your system the LG 8400B needs to be at the very top of your list.
The feeling of refinement continues through the tray mechanism. This is a little thing, admittedly, but it’s a little thing LG took the time to get right. It is quiet and silky smooth. More so in both categories than any computer drive I’ve owned and obviously better than the Lite-On’s I’ve used in the last year. The effort needed to close the tray is only average, however. The Plextor remains unique in its fingertip response.
One important difference between the LG 8400B and Lite-On drives is the style of the drive mechanism. As I mentioned earlier, all recent CD (and DVD) drives only read or burn at their peak speeds on the outer edge of the disc. At the beginning of the CD the drive is running at half of the max speed, or even less. The difference in mechanisms is how they get from one speed to the other when burning. Most drives use Zone CLV (Z-CLV), which means the drive almost comes to a stop at four or five spots on the disc as it changes speeds. Thinking of it like driving a car with a manual transmission is a good analogy.
The LG 8400B uses a Partial CAV (P-CAV) design. P-CAV accelerates smoothly as the head moves to the outer edge of the disc. The big advantage is reliability. Repeated slowing and acceleration greatly increases the stress on the electric motor. There’s also a performance advantage, but you have to look beyond the obvious to see it. Zone CLV drives can run at higher peak recording speeds but a Partial CAV design can start burning at a higher speed. The latter is more important for overall performance.
This helps give the LG 8400B class-leading performance. Using Nero 5.5 and CD Speed, I was able to burn a 700MB data disc in three minutes and ten seconds, generating an average burn speed of 33x. The 8400B ripped audio CD’s at an average speed of 32x. This beats the results I’ve seen for other 40x drives using the same programs, and comes within a few seconds of 48x or 52x drives. But I’ve yet to find the 48x or 52x drive that can match the quiet operation of the 8400B.
LG strays from the norm with their offering of buffer underrun protection, too. The 8400B uses their proprietary system called Super Link. Unlike many buffer underrun systems, Super Link is encoded into a chip on the drive and it works regardless of the burning software you use. Nero 5.5 did recognize it as "Burn Proof", but I've played around with some freeware burning programs without buffer underrun recognition and the system still worked fine. The buffer is only 2MB on my version of the 8400B (some early models had 8MB) so a good buffer underrun protection system is needed and Super Link delivers. But hardcore geeks should know that LG did not include Mt. Rainer support with the 8400B.
Last but certainly not least in its list of virtues, the 8400B makes a strong case on price. I’ve seen OEM drives (without burning software) for as low as $45 in online shops. Pricewatch lists the full retail version (with Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.1) as low as $50. Mine came from a surplus vendor on eBay, and is a little different. It was originally intended for a Gateway system and has a different (and better looking) black faceplate but the internals are identical. I was able to pick it up for $33 plus shipping. If there’s a better deal in a CD-RW drive, I couldn’t find it.
(There is one important note about burning software. If you are using Roxio/Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4 (OEM or Platinum/Retail) that program does not support the 8400B. You’ll need Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum or Nero 5.5 if you buy an OEM version of this drive.)
I don’t know if this will make sense to every reader, but here is just how impressed I was with this drive. When it came in, I put it in my existing system just to make sure it worked. I wasn’t even sure if I’d use it in the new rig because I didn't know if I could bring myself to part with my old Plextor 8x20 SCSI CD-R, which is a legendary drive.
The LG is still installed in the case and I don’t think I’ve used the Plextor once in the month since. Six weeks ago I would have told you no $33 drive could ever do that. Now I’m scrounging eBay for a matching DVD.
This is a seriously good CD-RW drive at an excellent price. I cannot recommend it enough.
-Brian Igo
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 33.00 Operating System: Windows
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