I've just spent six hours in mortal combat with a Lite-on CDR that a friend bought, and the accompanying Nero software. In the first place I installed the drive and tried to run it with the Adaptec Easy CD software that my friend is used to. No dice - it won't recognise the drive as a writer, although it was reading disks OK. The on-line drive manual gave three reasons for the drive not writing; insufficient hard disk space for the buffer, a disk inserted upside down, and not using the bundled software. I installed the Nero software that came with the drive. It made copies, but only when the CD writer was used as the read drive as well, and it insisted on trying to connect to the net for the track listings. The nice, fast Toshiba reader in the system is redundant as the Nero burning software throws up a read error if you try to use it as the read drive, although the Nero Media Player will quite happily play disks in it. I wouldn't advise anyone to buy a Lite-On drive after this experience. The Hewlett Packard it replaced was slow, but reliable.
On the other hand I have heard bad reports of some Hewlett Packard drives - apparently these are model-specific, ie some models are good, others are not.