GSA-H10A DVD Burner

PC World Australia (online)

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Replacing the ever-popular GSA-4167B is LG's GSA-H10A Super Multi DVD burner, which can burn to the majority of media that are available on the market, including DVD-RAM media (without cartridge).

Pros

  • Easily upgradable firmware

Cons

  • Burnt DVD+R DL discs may not be compatible with older drives

Bottom Line

While it boasts a slight speed improvement and its single layer performace was solid, only time (and firmware updates) will tell if it's a better overall driver than its predecessor

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 99.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

The drive doesn't look any different from its predecessor and it only possesses a slightly faster DVD+R DL writing speed.

It can write to DVD+R and DVD-R discs at up to 16x, but this speed is only reached at the end of the burn. A full write to store-bought TDK-branded DVD+R and DVD-R discs took 5mins 31sec and 5min 39sec, respectively, and tests with Nero's CD-DVD Speed showed smooth write curves.

While its 8x DVD+R DL writing capability is faster than the 6x speed of the GSA-4167B, it burnt to our 2.4x Verbatim discs at 6x. It took six minutes longer to burn to these discs than the GSA-4167B. This speed is also over 10 minutes slower than the time recorded by the Pioneer DVR-A11XLA, which has been the number one burner on our Best Buys chart.

Playing back the burnt data in Nero's CD-DVD Speed showed a smooth read curve and all burnt discs were read back perfectly on other PCs. Even though the drive automatically changed the book-type of the DVD+R DL discs to DVD-ROM to make them more compatible with older drives, these discs could not be read in our Pioneer A07 drive.

LG ships the drive with a utility for updating the firmware of the drive over the Internet. We used this utility without any problems to update the firmware to JL03 for testing.

Verdict: While it boasts a slight speed improvement and its single layer performance was solid, only time (and firmware updates) will tell if it's a better overall drive than its predecessor.

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