CDRLabs take a look at the Lite-ON SHM-165H6S Super AllWrite 16x DVD±RW. The drive is capable of 16x DVD+R, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 8x DVD+R DL, 4x DVD-R DL, 5x DVD-RAM writing speeds and a maximum DVD read speed of 16x.

The SHM-165H6S performed relatively well when writing to DVD+R and DVD-R media at 16x. At this speed, it took the drive a little more than 6 minutes to write an entire 4.7GB DVD. The SHM-165H6S also performed as expected when writing to DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM media. However, it wasn't as fast as some of the other drives we've tested. The SHM-165H6S's DVD+R DL writing performance did make up for this somewhat. Thanks to its 8x writing speed, the drive took less than 18 minutes to burn 8GB of data.

When it came to media compatibility and writing quality, the SHM-165H6S gave us some mixed results. The drive wrote to most of our test media at its rated speeds, but was not able to write to any 8x DVD±R discs at 16x, even with its OverSpeed function enabled. Writing quality was also an issue with the SHM-165H6S. As we showed you in our tests, there were a number of cases where the jitter level and PI/PIF rates were very high. Hopefully, Lite-On can fix this in a future firmware update.

Lite-On's new drive did pretty well in our DVD read tests. It was able to read both single layer DVD-ROM's and DVD-Videos at 16x and had some relatively good seek times. Reading recordable media wasn't a problem for the SHM-165H6S either. In our tests, it read both DVD±R and DVD±RW media at 12x and DVD±R DL discs at a respectable 8x.

The SHM-165H6S was also fairly quick when reading CD's. In our tests, the drive read pressed and CD-R media at speeds as high as 49x and CD-RW discs at 33x. On top of that, it was able to rip audio CD's at an impressive 48x. The SHM-165H6S also performed pretty well when writing to CD-R media. Lite-On's new drive not only turned in some impressive times, its writing quality was quite good. Unfortunately, due to its 24x CD-RW writing speed, the SHM-165H6S did not do as well as some of the other drives in our rewriting tests.