LG Electronics 32X/12X/8X REWRITABLE EIDE/ATAP CED-8120BI 8MB W/SOFTWARE RETAIL

LG Electronics CED-8120B

February 2, 2001

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• Reviewed by: sproux

  Strengths: Quiet, smooth, reliable, huge buffer, flawless audio extraction. Works fine on my Pentium 133.

  Weaknesses: 12x8x32 is no longer one of the fastest drives. I cannot burn reliably over 4x on my Pentium 133, although its full 12x speed can be achieved easily on a P3-800.

  Overall: I bought this drive because the University of Colorado, where I work, had these drives OEM installed on all our new P3-800 computers. I had never heard of LG before, but I was amazed at these drives. Why? 1. Quiet. This drive will not make enough noise to disturb you unless you're in a studio. 2. Fast. The read performance is excellent. I would buy this drive just for how good of a CD-ROM drive it is! Discs spin up fast, DAE is fast, everything is fast. The drive is super-reliable too; I've never had a problem. 3. Great DAE. Extracted audio is perfect, with no clicks, pops, or other flaws. I would happily recommend this drive for ripping and copying audio CDs. 4. Huge 8MB buffer. The drive does not have BURN-PROOF technology, but the massive buffer prevents most buffer underruns. 5. Good manual and software. The included manual is very thorough and well-illustrated. Easy CD Creator and DirectCD are included. Based on 9 months of superb experience with these LG burners and some similar LG CD-ROM drives, I was convinced enough to buy one myself. So I leaped at the opportunity when I saw one at Best Buy for $70. This drive was for my old Pentium 133, so I can't use all the write speeds, but it works great at 4x. And I know from experience at work that it works well at the higher speeds too. For $70, you can't go wrong!

• Reviewed by: dcodo

  Strengths: Very easy to install, very good performance for most users and low price.

  Weaknesses: Can't burn in 1x or 2x, you have to got a very good system to burn audio in 12x (without make images), not best softwares.

  Overall: I have a PII 233, 96MB, HD Fireball Plus As 20GB, a Creative CDRom 24x and I just bought my LG 8120. I put it alone in IDE 2 as master, and let the HD and the CDRom in IDE 1. The BIOS recognized it very quickly, and it worked perfectly at Windows. Then I installed the softwares. The DirectCD (for CDRW) worked very well, but I coudn't open the Easy CD Creator (I don't know why yet). So I decided to use Nero and it worked perfectly!! It recognized the CD Recorder with it's all possible speeds and then I could start burning... I've made until now 5 CDs. A data cd from image at 12x, an audio cd from image at 12x, and two audio cds directly (without images) at 8x. And I lost one trying to burn audio directly at 12x. The 8MB buffer was not sufficient for that. So, this is my experience with this drive for now. I can surely say that it's a great drive and that it works very well for most recording types. I'm very happy with my shop now and expect continue to be for a long time. Hope this could help somebody. (I thought other reviews on the net very usefull ) Thanks for reading and, please, forgive my english.

• Reviewed by: historyjensen

  Strengths: Very quiet, easy to install and came with adaptec easy CD creator.

  Weaknesses: Can't record on the fly or use maximum recording speed.

  Overall: At first I made 3 coasters, but figured out I needed to reconfigure my IDE cables. But even after that I couldn't get it to record at max. speed. The fastest I could get out of it was 8x. And it has problems recording on the fly. I recently purchased a new system and I haven't tried it on that yet. But my old system was a Pentium II 350 w/128mb of ram. That should be fine for this CDRW. As long as I record at 8x it works fine. Over all, for the price it does the job. I should have done my research better, but I was a little strapped for cash.

• Reviewed by: MarcioSchinkoeth

  Strengths: Extremely quiet and trustful (never lost any CD)

  Weaknesses: It has owner's manual in portuguese only for the Easy CD Creator, but who cares?

  Overall: It is extremely quiet. The only noise appears when its moving the lens searching for a track. When it's reading or writing, it simply makes no noise at all. I really got amazed with that because I've got a Creative CDR 52x that looks like an airplane turbine. The Easy CD Creator is also much easier than Nero Burning Rom. It also has the best cost/benefit nowadays than the 40x10x16, and is very trustful (I've never lost any CD).

• Reviewed by: ZORAX

  Strengths: Read/Write in full RAW-DAO+96 bytes of subchannel data. Generous 8 MB buffer, virtually free of buffer under runs. Fast and quiet.

  Weaknesses: Cannot correct EFM encoding of regular bit patterns.

  Overall: This writer is great! It has support for all reading and writing modes, and allows every kind of media. It doesn't get 5 stars only for not being able to correct EFM encoding of regular bit patterns, so don't expect it to copy SafeDisc 2.