CDRLabs take a further look at the LG GSA-H10. This burner has some nice specs and a decent software bundle too! 16x DVD±R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 10x DVD+R DL and 6x DVD-R DL writing speeds and has a maximum DVD read speed of 16x. In addition, the LG can read and write to DVD-RAM media at 12x! But it doesn't drop the ball on CDs either, as it can read and write to them at 48x, with 32x rewriting speeds. Then, to top it off, they also throw in some Nero and CyberLink software.

It shouldn't be too surprising that what the GSA-H10N does best is write DVD's. Thanks to its P-CAV writing method, it took about five and a half minutes to write an entire 4.7GB DVD, beating even Plextor's 18x DVD±RW drive by a small margin. This level of performance carried over to our rewriting tests where the GSA-H10N turned in some very good times with DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM media. Writing to DVD±R DL media wasn't a problem for LG's new drive either. Thanks to its 10x writing speed, the GSA-H10N took a little more than 14 minutes to burn 8GB of data.

With a drive like the GSA-H10N, media compatibility and writing quality are just as important as speed. Fortunately, finding DVD±R media that would work at 16x really wasn't an issue. The drive wrote to most of our test media at its rated speeds and was even able to write to some 8x DVD+R discs at 12x. When it came to writing quality though, the GSA-H10N gave us some mixed results. While the PI/PIF rates were pretty good with most of the DVD±R media we tested, the jitter levels were higher than we'd like to see. This is a little concerning, as we didn't see anything like this with LG's previous drives. However, it did not seem to have any effect on readability.

LG's new "Super-Multi" drive also performed relatively well in our DVD read tests. Along with some fairly good seek times, the GSA-H10N was able to read single layer DVD-ROM's and DVD±R media at 16x. The drive also read DVD±RW discs at 13x and both DVD±R DL and DVD-RAM media at an impressive 12x, but slowed to 4.8x when reading DVD-Videos. While this doesn't have any effect on movie playback, there are better drives out there if you want to rip DVD movies.