Compared to their CD-burning cousins, DVD-writers have taken longer to get faster. While CDs went from single speed to 52-speed in a few years, DVD's have topped out at 16-speed.

All is about to change with the Lite-On LH-20A1H, which claims to write DVD-R and DVD+R discs at up to 20-speed. It's also compatiable with 8-speed DVD+RW discs, 6-speed DVD-RW discs and dual-layer discs.

There's a slight catch to this claim, though, as only certain DVD discs are capable of being recorded to and read back reliably at this speed. Lite-On has a list of approved discs but most we've never heard of.

Note that all these discs are 16-speed and it's Lite-On's Smart-Write technology that is claimed to squeeze the extra performance out of discs.

The drive itself looks standard enough, with a slightly shorter profile than some, but the standard set of sockets at the back.

It includes a copy of Nero 7 Essentials and three different fascias - beige, black and silver – for colour-matching it to most PCs.

To test the performance claims we took a 1GB mix of different sized files and copied them to the Lite-On. We did this twice with Smart-Write switched off and then repeated the tests with it switched on, averaging the results of the two runs. Finally we replaced the drive with a 16-speed NEC ND4571 DVD-writer and ran them again.

With Smart-Write disabled the Lite-On achieved an average of 2 mins 50 seconds, with a six second improvement with Smart-Write enabled, which is hardly substantial and certainly not the claimed 20 per cent increase. More interesting, though, was the NEC DVD-writer, which shaved 16 seconds off the Lite-On's best time of 2 mins 44 seconds.

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