CD-RW drives are fast becoming an essential part of a PC, even though they're not the cheapest add-ons available. The LG CED-8120B CD-RW drive, however, is priced at just £80 and, no, that's not a misprint.

The drive comes equipped with everything you need to get started - cables, a blank CD-R and CD-RW disc plus a copy of Easy CD Creator software. To install the drive, you have to open up your PC case but it's pretty straightforward.

The drive reads discs at 32-speed, writes to CD-Rs at 12-speed and writes to CD-RWs at 8-speed; that means you can create a 74-minute audio CD in about six minutes. Unfortunately, the drive doesn't have burn-proof technology to prevent discs being spoiled by the buffer underrun - a situation that can arise when the PC can't supply data fast enough to the drive for writing to a disc. Given the price though, this is a minor quibble and, as long as you don't use your PC for something else while it's making a disc, you shouldn't have any problems.

In our tests, the drive didn't quite achieve its advertised speeds but still performed well overall. It formatted a blank CD-RW disc in 16 minutes - a task which until recently took as long as 30 to 45 minutes. Writing 529Mb of data to a CD-R took six minutes. The same data to a CD-RW took 10 minutes, equivalent to 10-speed and 6-speed figures, respectively.

The drive itself is sturdy and sports the usual function buttons for eject, play and skip, as well as standard indicator lights for read and write disc activity. There's not a lot to be said about the drive's aesthetics - it's a grey box.

The drive won't win any design awards but for 80 quid, it's probably the cheapest CD-RW drive on the market and performs beyond the expectations which the price tag might suggest.

Contact: LG
0870 607 5544
www.lge.co.uk