TopTenREVIEWS

TopTenREVIEWS - Bronze Award - Awarded for excellence in design, useability and feature set

Our third pick, LG Electronics' GSA-2166 D is fast, compatible, comes with a good collection of software, and wins our "TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award"

This DVD burner has some of the fastest speeds and competes with the best in all areas except with DVD-R DL disks, in which it runs at 4x instead of 6x like MegaSTOR. Additionally, it cannot connect by a FireWire port, if you need this option see Plextor or MegaSTOR.

Feature Set:

This burner supports almost any type of disk that you can think of, and perhaps even a few you have never heard of. The only disk the GSA-2166D won't burn is CD+G disks for karaoke. It can play DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, dual layer disks, CD-Text, CD-ROM XA, Photo-CD and many others.

This burner has a 2MB buffer with underrun protection and it includes the following software: Nero Express, Cover Designer, BackItUp, InCD, Cyberlink PowerProducer Gold and Power DVD to play your DVDs. It also comes with a one-year warranty.

About the only feature that this burner is missing is the ability to connect through a FireWire port; however, it can connect to a USB 2.0 or USB 1.1 port easily.

Burner Speed:

Most of the speed capabilities of this product are exceptional, except for DVD-R DL, which runs slower than our #1 product. It can read DVDs and write to single layer disks at 16x and write to DVD+RW, DVD+R DL disks at 8x.

Help/Support:

The help and support of LG Electronics is quick and responsive. They replied to our email within four hours. They do not support live chat but do provide a toll-free telephone number. They also offer installation instructions, FAQs and downloads.

Summary:

LG Electronics GSA-2166D is a great external DVD burner that is fast, flexible and provides outstanding product support.

However, if you need a burner that will connect by FireWire you may want to look at MegaSTOR or Plextor.