LG 8120b

It’s tough to review optical drives, like CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs. Once you get past the model number, it’s pretty much a look at some benchmarks and a picture of the front, top, back and packaging of the drive. Factor in that almost every computer has a CD-ROM drive that does the basics, installing and running software from CD, and you’ve got the whole picture. What I’ll try and do here is present basic observations to go along with the benchmarks and pretty pictures.

This time around we’re looking at the LG 8120B CD Rewriter. It writes at 12x, rewrites at 8x and reads at 32x. “X” represents a multiple of the original CD spec of 150 kb per second. It supports all major writing formats, and has an 8 MB buffer. LG drives are only available with an ATAPI interface, the 8120B working up to ATA33 speeds. It has a 110 ms access time and a 4800 KB/s transfer speed, according to the company’s specs.

I purchased the retail package, as I couldn’t get an OEM model. Upon opening the flashy box I examined the contents: a 40 pin IDE cable, three pin audio cable, four mounting screws, Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4.0 standard, a multi-language manual, one CD-R, one CD-RW and the drive itself.

Installation was straight forward, as the drive was set to Master. I plugged it onto my Promise Ultra100 ATA controller and everything was working. For testing I used CD Speed 99 v0.80, which is the most common benchmark. As well I ran Nero 5.5, Direct CD 3.0 and Clone CD 2.8.5.2; the drive wrote CD-Rs and CD-RWs at it’s rated speed. I put in a blank, selected 12x recording and burned a full CD. As well it copied every disk I threw at it in Clone CD without difficulty. Let’s take a look at the CD Speed results; since this is my first optical drive review I don’t have a comparison, other than the company’s specifications.

One other point about the 8120b’s performance; throughout testing I found the drive to be fairly quiet.

CD Speed 99 results