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LiteOn’s eSAU208 is a portable USB DVD writer, and is available in either black and white or red and black. Although it comes with a power adaptor, the device worked fine with our laptop’s USB ports using the included two-plug USB cable. LightScribe discs can be written only if the power adaptor is plugged in. The eSAU208 wrote a LightScribe disc in 25 minutes, which is what we’d expect. It wrote dual-layer DVDs at around 4X, matching its claimed speeds for this kind of media. It was the same speed for single-layer DVDs, which is short of its 8x claimed speed for single-layer discs. We’ve seen faster portable drives, such as LG’s GSA-E50N (Labs, Shopper 240), which reached 5X.
A copy of Nero Recode is bundled with the eSAU208, which lets you squeeze a two-layer DVD movie on to a single-layer disc. LiteOn’s eSAU208 is a good portable DVD writer, but LG’s GSA-E50N is still our favourite portable burner thanks to its slightly faster single-layer writing speeds and the ability to password-protect discs.
