I know what you mean about warranty voiding, but the liteon upgrade is a liitle different.
To go from a 411s to a 811s you need to hack the eeprom (seperate from the firmware) and use a hacked firmware file. The hacked firmware won\'t be necessary once someone figures out how a certain checksum is calculated, but it is for the moment.
Liteon has updated their site recently to state that they won\'t service any drive that has been flashed with the firmware from another drive. You can almost always use a third party utility to flash liteon drives though, even if it doesn\'t show up in the bios, so you would have to be pretty unlucky to end up with a dead drive that you couldn\'t flash back to the original eeprom + firmware. Still, it might be a problem for some people.
The liteon dvd burners are also excellent 40x cd burners. A lot of dvd burners are much slower than that. Have fun shopping.
-greg