With 52X write speeds and the right media, the Lite-On drive can create an entire audio CD in just a few minutes, although burning at top speeds can be a bit noisy. The 24X rewrite speed matches that of most top level drives on the market, moving data with drag-and-drop ease thanks to the drive's Mt. Rainier support.

The drive installed as easily as any other internal optical drive. Unfortunately, the drive's manual is included on CD, so you'll either have to print it out or reference it on another PC when installing the drive. Lite-On did include a quick installation guide that covered the basics of putting the drive in your system, but it seems like too many vendors are cutting costs these days by not offering a printed manual.

Lite-On includes Ahead Software's excellent suite of applications for writing and rewriting. Nero Burning ROM handles the writes, while InCD takes care of rewrites. Both programs are powerful and fairly intuitive to use. Lite-On also included blank media (one CD-R and one CD-RW) to get you started on your burning and backing up.

The 2MB buffer is about average for the industry, while Lite-On's Smart-Burn and Smart-X technologies help the buffer reduce the possibility of errors when burning or extracting audio tracks from CD. The Lite-On drive supports a variety of formats, including Video and Photo CD, Enhanced CD, and CD-Text, as well as a wide range of blank media.

It doesn't have a lot of advanced features, such as special audio recording modes, but what the drive does, it does well. While we would have liked to see better documentation, it's also nice to see such a high-speed drive at a great price. If you need to replace an aging CD-RW drive, you can do so quite affordably with the Lite-On 52X/24X/52X CD-RW drive.

Pro: Fast speeds, very affordable.

Con: Minimal print documentation.