Been searching through the other threads on this drive, though it might be good to have a thread just about this one's performance.
Just picked up a Verbatim 52x drive for $19 (MIR), and it's a 5224A.
Seems this drive is producing slightly lower quality burns than my LTR-52226S, notably on Verbatim 24x RW discs, and at 52x on TDK 52x media. So far, the TDK is the only media I have that it will burn at 52x, and while it completes the burn at 52x where the LiteOn does not, the qulaity is lower. Of course it doesn't work in CDDr or Kprobe, so I have to test in the LiteOn which may not be fair.

TDK(Ritel TG) burned at 52x:



The Verbatim UltraSpeed 24x is showing about 2x the C1 error rates as on the LiteOn, but no C2.

The ASUS is allowing slower burn speed on every media I try, compared to the Liteon, and there's no way to turn off the speed limitation, as there is with the LiteOn.
It's also slower to recognise a disc than the LiteOn is. I did notice that it seems to be a bit faster to erase the 24x RW media, and lead out writing time seems a bit quicker as well, on all media.
No question that C1 rates are running about 2x that of the Liteon, when the disc is tested on the LiteOn in Kprobe or CDDr.

What firmware? Because with v1.20 mine wrote complete garbage to Princo 48X discs and limited them to 32X whereas my 40125W was producing discs with Max 8 C1 and 0 C2's at 40X.

After updating to v1.35 (which involved putting the drive in another PC to flash) I am getting similar results including the 40X speed limitation.

Will agree with the disc recognision times though. I can put a disc in the Asus, close it, open my lite-on, put a disc in that and it still wins.


(left: 40125W WS09, right: 5224A v1.2)

It came with v1.0, I flashed it to v1.34. Don't see a lot of difference in burn quality or media compatability(speeds) between the 2. It's also a bit noisier than the LiteOn, and the tray is much slower to open/close. All in all, so far an unimpressive drive, but for $19, I'm not complaining much. I needed something new to play with until a LTR-52327S shows up. I'll burn some more with it tomorrow and test it out. The slow burn speed are pretty disappointing, but maybe ASUS knows it can't handle faster. Maybe I'll feed it some cheap CMC and see how it likes that.
I've also noticed a tendancy towards a curve of errors at the start of the burn, which might suggest that the laser calibration is not adjusting well for the media.

Asus is using a belt mechanism for the drive, whereas Lite On use pure gears so as well as being slower the tray probably won't last as long.

Here's the same burn on 2 Verbatim Ultra-Speed 24x discs.

Burned in LiteOn 52x:



Burned in the ASUS 52x:



When erasing the same 2 discs, one in each burner and setting for erasing multiple recorders, the ASUS finishes about 45 sec ahead of the LiteOn.

Just had a chance to do some DAE with the ASUS, and it delivered on it's promise of high speed DAE. It topped out at 51x on a 73 min audio CDR, reading x2 and verifying with 0 errors reported. It appears that this is a good reader, worth $20 just for that!

A comparison with the Ritek TG (TDK 52x) media. Both are 700MB burned at 40x.
Both are read in the LiteOn drive.

Burned in the ASUS:



Burned in the LiteOn:



Clearly the ASUS is not too frinedly with the Ritek media.