There are no changes at the rear panel, either. There’s still no hole to ventilate the drive’s innards. By the way, Lite-On is still manufacturing its drives in the “shortened” design – the depth is smaller than standard, which is an advantage considering the current miniaturization trend in the computer systems industry. The connectors are all labeled at the real panel – inexperienced users should find it helpful. Now, let’s take a look inside:

The SOHW-1213S drive is based on a third-generation chipset from MediaTek Inc that consists of two chips: a main DSP MT1816E and an auxiliary MT1828E chip that controls the servomotor. The drive uses an SF-DB 10SA optical pickup unit from Sanyo.

Of course, this DVD-burner supports all the exclusive technologies from Lite-On intended to reduce noise and vibration, to improve burn quality and to avoid the buffer underrun error.

Now let’s check out the technical characteristics of the drive:

• CD-R burn: 48 max (CAV);
• CD-RW burn: 24x (Z-CLV);
• DVD burn:
  • DVD+R: 12x Z-CLV;
  • DVD+RW: 4x, 2.4x CLV;
  • DVD-R: 8x Z-CLV;
  • DVD-RW: 4x, 2x, 1x CLV.
• DVD read: 12x max CAV;
• CD-ROM read: 48x max CAV;
• Supported CD formats: CD: CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-ROM / XA, Photo-CD, Multi-session, Karaoke-CD, Video-CD, CD-I FMV, CD Extra, CD Plus, CD-R, and CD-RW;
• Supported DVD formats: DVD single/dual-layer (PTP/OTP ), DVD-R (3.9GB/4.7GB), DVD-R multi-borders, DVD+R, DVD+R multi-sessions, DVD-RW and DVD+RW;
• CD burn modes: Track At Once, Session At Once, Disc At Once, Variable and Fixed Packet Writing;
• DVD+R/RW burn modes: Sequential Write, Multi-session, Random Access Write;
• DVD-R/RW burn modes: Disc At Once, Incremental Recording, Multi-border Recording, Restricted Overwriting;
• Buffer size: 2MB;
• Declared access time: 160 milliseconds for both CD and DVD media.

Here’s the information reported by Nero InfoTool and DVDInfo about the SOHW-1213S drive:

Note the support of Streaming and S.M.A.R.T and the lack of Mt. Rainier for both CD-RW and DVD+RW media – the last fact is rather strange for a modern device. It’s all clear with the drive’s technical characteristics, although the 12x DVD burn speed and the Z-CLV algorithm for burning 12x DVD+Rs is not the height of progress anymore. But the drive has been around in the market for rather long, and we should make allowances for that.