$49 prime peripheral dvd drive at compusa - any good?

[kafka]

compusa has the prime peripheral 8x drive for $20 instant rebate and $30 mail in rebate for a net price of $49.
I'm not saying this is super hot, but its as low as i can remember seeing a dvd drive.
Is the drive any good?

 

[chexi]

I have one of these. It's junk. Doesn't like to work well with other CD-rom drives in the system. It also doesn't even come with a driver. For me to get mine to work, I had to remove my other cd-rom drive and even then it only works in dvd-mode if its the first thing I use when I boot up. AFter that it locks my system. There web site is a joke, no drivers, no faq, no nothin! I wouldn't get this again.

 

[SoulAssassin]

Generally their products suck. Real bad.

 

[Dantzig]

chexi - You shouldn't need drivers for a CD-ROM or DVD drive if you're running anything more recent than Windows 3.x! Are you sure that you configured the master/slave/cable select jumper on the back of the drive correctly? Is the drive properly recognized and configured in your BIOS? Is the drive detected as DMA-capable? If not, disable DMA in Windows. Your problem does not sound like its the drive's fault. . . . however, I cannot say anything about this company since I have never used anything from them.

 

[Sept1967]

They work great.

I have an 8x and a 10x from the same type of rebates.
The drive in the box is an Afreey DVD(PP doesnt make drives).

I havent had any problems with either in about a year now.
Movies are great, reading CD's for backup no problems.

Im not sure what "drivers" you would need, unless your in DOS mode.
Both PC's BIOS' see the drives, and so does Win98se.

So you get a DVD, for about the same price you would pay for a CD only drive. Mine even came bundled with WinDVD software, and a dos driver disk.

 

[hatexd]

Not 12x. Too bad.

 

[FuzzyBee]

If it is an afreey, though, it should rip at crazy speeds...

 

[johnski]

kafka

I have one of these dvd roms and it's an Afree. It worked out of the box on my BH6 but when I tried it in s Soyo 6Y-BB I had to install the driver to get the machine to boot. It worked very well with my All in Wonder Pro and it did support UDMA. My benchmark performance was average but not bad and it wasn't loud. I didn't benchmark it for DVD performance at the time, however I did benchmark the 12x version and it was quite disappointing. It maxed out at 5x dvd read and bottomed at 2x. At that point I packaged it back up and returned it to compusa. Still haven't received my rebate from them but I checked the rebates website and it said the check was dated 1-22. Oh yeah it didn't have any problem reading cdr or cdrw disks. Why don't you check it out for yourself and return it if it doesn't meet your expectations.
Follow the instructions to install the driver. You don't do it through the device manager

 

[LordMaul]

yeah, you can return it, but they will nail you for a 15% restocking fee for an open item.

 

[mdplayer00]

Just don't buy iomagic dvd drives from compusa. I brought a 10x dvd drive for my sister a couple months ago when I built her a new comp and the first thing it did was eat (I mean chew up, scratch beyond recognition) the installation cd that I put in. My sister had to bring it back for a refund and I end up getting a 12x dvd drive(forgot the company, but it was made by panasonic) from outpost (back in the good old free shipping days) for less(no tax) and it works perfectly.

 

[Cyberian]

"If it is an afreey, though, it should rip at crazy speeds..."

O.K. - I'm a bit new at DVD Drives(still watching movies on a Betamax ) but trying to learn.
What exactly can you 'rip' on this drive??

Thanks!!

 

[Dantzig]

Cyberian - I believe he was talking about the DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) speed for the drive.