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Any difference between DVD burners?

SonicIce

SonicIce

Diamond Member
I need a new DVD burner and on Newegg theres so many brands to choose from and it looks like they have nearly the same specs. Any reason not to get a SATA drive? I am not worried about speed I just want reliable burns. Any difference between LG, Sony, Liteon, or Samsung?
 
Some people are really picky about this, but to me a burner is a burner and for roughly $30-35 get whatever's available and cheap. It costs a few bucks more for Lightscribe or something similar if you want it. I prefer SATA because the cables are less annoying that parallel ATA.

I rarely burn discs these days but have never coastered using Sony-NEC-Optiarc-whatever they're called now drives. There was an article on Tom's Hardware that said newer is better.
 
Not really, I usually just sort by price and pick the first one from a brand that I've heard of.
 
Consider a Blue Ray burner from Pioneer. $200 but then you can burn 50 gig blue ray discs to back up all your data. Right now the discs cost $10 each, but that price should come down.
 
imported_NoGodForMe said:
Consider a Blue Ray burner from Pioneer. $200 but then you can burn 50 gig blue ray discs to back up all your data. Right now the discs cost $10 each, but that price should come down.
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What is the point when you get for the price 2TB of Drive space that can be used for backup only.
 
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The last few lite-ons that ive ordered have been noisy (the 22x ones).

I switched to the cheap LGs and they are much quieter.

The burn time is equal on the same CD for both, ill pay $2 to not have a tornado in my PC.
 
For me, the biggest issue I've seen with DVD writers over the past few years has been the life of the DVD writer itself. I don't really care about speed or noise. I've had a couple of failures of barely-used NEC and Lite-On DVD drives, so I won't buy any more of those. So, nowadays, I'm mostly buying Samsung and LG drives.

Like hard drives, though, it's hard to know what's really reliable unless you sell hundreds of them. None of them are as bad as some of the cheap CD-RW drives from the mid-90s (Edit: late-90s). Many of those would only last a month or two.
 
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I've ran into several issues with BenQ and Liteons where they refuse to write certain disks and Nero just throws a non-obvious error message. First time I probably spent two hours trying to figure out why the disc won't write until I figured out it was the drive.

And what happened to the price of these drives. When I bought my Sony-NEC about a year ago they were about $20-25 each and most had free shipping from Newegg.
 
Interesting to read the various experiences people have with certain brands. I have three Liteons and they are working great. Never had a problem and we do a lot of burning/gaming.

I've had Samsung and NEC die on me in less than a year. The best wise advice given here is to go with a good name brand in bargain mode. Usually burners don't last beyond 5 years anyway and some say if you get 2 years you're lucky (for which I disagree).
 
I've used LiteOn, Pioneer, LG, NEC, Sony and Asus. All worked well except for the Asus. I've got an LG that is going on 3 years old and still works great. I usually get whatever is < $30 as long as it's not Asus or LiteOn.My LiteOn worked well for a while but started doing strange things before it was pulled. That's a sample size of 1 so don't put too much value on my experience with them. They sells tons of drives.
 
zerocool84 said:
That's what I do. Bought the cheapest Samsung burner, $22 and works great.
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The last reviews I read for DVD burners actually had the Samsung 233 outclassing all the others pretty handily too, and since it's the same cheap price as all the others I just recommend that. Even though they all perform close enough to awesome for how rarely I actually use the DVD drive anyway.
 
My Nec 3500(?) is still running strong 🙂. I will only reccomend Samsung and NEC/Sony's now, as they are usually the cheapest and get the job done.

Does TDK still make burners? lol Those were loud!
 
Ultralight said:
Interesting to read the various experiences people have with certain brands. I have three Liteons and they are working great. Never had a problem and we do a lot of burning/gaming.

I've had Samsung and NEC die on me in less than a year. The best wise advice given here is to go with a good name brand in bargain mode. Usually burners don't last beyond 5 years anyway and some say if you get 2 years you're lucky (for which I disagree).
Click to expand...

I have a Ricoh 4x4x20 CD-RW that still works -- it's well beyond 5 years service life.
 
jae said:
My Nec 3500(?) is still running strong 🙂. I will only reccomend Samsung and NEC/Sony's now, as they are usually the cheapest and get the job done.

Does TDK still make burners? lol Those were loud!
Click to expand...

The first ones they had were rebadged Ricohs I think. The Ricoh drives chirped a lot when the heads moved -- at least the 4x4x20 drives did.
 
I just stay away from Lite-On. Had 2, both were turds.

Still using a 3 year old LG, and the ones at my first job were LG, we did a lot of burning and they were always great. Would like to get an SATA one to get rid of the IDE cable in my system, but I can't justify a cable swap fro $30.
 
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