B
efore you get too excited about LG’s combo optical drive, bear in mind
that while the GGW-H10NI Super Multi Blue can read both Blu-ray and
HD DVD discs, it can write to only the former format. Still, this drive offers a
degree of flexibility that no other next-gen drive we’ve tested has. You won’t
be shut out of watching movies from studios that have allied themselves with
just one of the high-def formats. Not surprisingly, this luxury doesn’t come
cheap. At $1,200, the Super Multi Blue costs more than your average Blu-ray
burner—by as much as $600.
But here’s something else that makes this drive special: 4x BD-R burns.
The other Blu-ray burners we’ve tested have been capped at 2x speeds when
burning to single-layer high-def media.
In real-world terms, 4x amounts to a sig-
nificant time sav-
ings. Using LG’s
drive, we burned
22.5GB of data
to our disc in
27:27 (min:sec).
Granted, that’s
hardly speedy,
but it’s half the
time it’s taken
us with other drives. When burning to rewriteable media (BD-RE), the Super
Multi Blue took 45:11 to fill a single-layer disc, while the competition typically
takes more than 90 minutes to complete this task. (The exception is the Lite-
On LH-2B1S that we reviewed in July, which lacks a data-verification feature
commonly employed for BD-RE situations—see chart below.)
Like most of the other Blu-ray burners we’ve tested, the Super Multi
Blue is spec’d for 8x DVD burns. Consequently, it took us 10:09 to write
4.37GB of data to a DVD+R disc. That’s not as fast as Lite-On’s burner, which
is spec’d at 12x, but then again, Lite-On’s drive can’t hold a candle to LG’s
BD-R speeds. That fact, combined with this drive’s dual-format HD reads and
its future-proof SATA interface are the reasons we picked the Super Multi
Blue for this year’s Dream Machine (see page 24).
—KATHERINE STEVENSONLG GGW-H10NI Super
Multi Blue
Blu-ray and HD DVD capabilities in a single drive
With LG’s Super Multi Blue, you won’t have time to eat a full-
course meal while your Blu-ray disc is burning.9
lg super multi blue
$1,200, http://www.lge.comDVD Write SpeeD AVerAge 6.67x 8.95x
DVD reAD SpeeD AVerAge 7.61x 9.36x
AcceSS time (rAnDom/Full) 190ms/374ms 138ms/216ms
cpu utilizAtion (8x) 30% 31%
time to burn 22.5gb to bD-r (min:Sec) 27:27 46:41
time to burn 22.5gb to bD-re (min:Sec) 45:11 46:36LG LITE-ONBest scores are bolded. All tests were conducted using the latest version of Nero CD-DVD
Speed and Verbatim media. Our test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine using a dual-core
2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, an
ATI X1950 Pro videocard, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, and a PC Power and Cooling
Turbo Cool 850 PSU.benchMARKS
Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tizedreviews