CDRlabs.com has posted a review of Lite-On's new double-layer drive, the SOHW-832S. Capable of writing DVD-R/+R media at 8x and DVD-RW/+RW media at 4x, the drive also supports writing to DVD+R DL media at 2.4x. Long respected for their optical drive products, does Lite-On have another winner? Here's a snippet from the review:

Like Lite-On's previous DVD writers, the SOHW-832S performed pretty well overall. The drive turned in some very good times when writing to DVD+R media at 8x, but wasn't as fast as some of the others when writing to DVD-R media at this speed. Reading DVD's wasn't a problem for the SOHW-832S either. In our tests, it was able to read single layer data and video DVD's at 12x and most recordable media at 8x.

These days, media compatibility and writing quality are just as important as speed. While better than its Sony counterpart, the SOHW-832S gave us some mixed results in these areas. The drive wrote to all of our test media at its rated speed. However, like the DRU-700A, it was not able to write to any 4x DVD±R media at 8x. This was a little surprising, considering Lite-On's earlier drives had this capability. The SOHW-832S's writing quality also could have been better as there were a number of cases where the PI/PIF errors got very high. Hopefully, Lite-On can fix this in a future firmware update.