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Are there any quality dvdrw drives anymore??

AmdEmAll

AmdEmAll

Diamond Member
I remember Plextor and Pioneer used to make awesome drives and now pioneer you can barely find and plextor is made by other companies now. The $20 drives are decent but I need something that makes perfect copies. I can't seem to find a high quality drive.
 
AmdEmAll said:
I remember Plextor and Pioneer used to make awesome drives and now pioneer you can barely find and plextor is made by other companies now. The $20 drives are decent but I need something that makes perfect copies. I can't seem to find a high quality drive.
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Perfect copies of what?

Data DVDs? They all do it well enough.

Video DVDs? Just make sure you can bypass the region protection in the drive, somehow.

Data CDs? Scrounge forums like MyCE (formerly CD Freaks) and cdr-info, to find what drives are bad/good for CDs. It mostly depends on the controller chip used.

Audio CDs? See above, and use one of the few ripping programs with offset detection, offset setting, and AccurateRip.
 
I too am not sure what you mean by "perfect copies", but if you want something of better Quality, an M-Disc drive is something to consider. M-Disc disks do not degrade like previous CD/DVD disks.
 
i've been using strictly plextor dvd/rw and blu/rw for years. always great drives. plextools software is great for checking disc quality and easy to update drive firmware
 
For some time now I have been using Panasonic DVD burners.
The models in mind also swallow DVD-Ram with cartridge. Never had an issue with them.
Afaik, those models are available with IDE interface only.
I will get rid of mine soon and buy the Blue Ray model (SW-5584 or similar), which is a SATA drive..
 
Well i'll be honest what its for.. my DVD navigation in my Lexus ls430 is version 1.0. Being a 2002 the maps are ancient. Half the roads aren't even there and the stealership wants $300 for the updated disc. Ive tried to follow how to get it to work and ive got the certain discs it needs and I can only get it to load but not function properly after that.

Others have said it needs to be a pioneer or plextor drive. Plextor sucks now so I might just have to find a pioneer or find a disc on fleabay lol.

Cerb thanks for the websites, i'll check them out. The dvd reader in these cars is incredibly picky.
 
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Hah, the truth comes out.

Anyways, assuming your Lexus's drive isn't becoming flaky, an easy solution is just to buy top quality discs (eg. the aforementioned Taiyo Yudens), and then burn them at 1X speed.

98% of so-called drive problems have to do with people buying poor to mediocre media, and/or trying to burn them at 16X.

Also, some of the older drives prefer DVD-ROM or at least DVD-R. You can buy DVD+R drives and flash them so they set the DVD type flag to -ROM. If they see +R they freak out, but the same +R media flagged as +R works fine. However, that doesn't sound like your problem.
 
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Optiarc models prior to the AD-7280 are excellent drives.
That's pretty much all I have around here (~8x 7261S, ~4x 7240S), along with a few holdouts (2x BenQ DW1640, etc.)
 
My two burners are Asus DRW-24B1ST and Optiarc DVD RW AD-7220S. Both made disc that didnt work properly. The disc has to be a DVD+R DL and as recommended on the lexus forums I tried JVC and Verbatim. Also tried 'matrix' and of course that garbage failed completely lol.

You guys think the optiarc is the better of the 2? I'll try and make a few more copies at low speed.
 
Try DVD-R DL, maybe? Are the maps really >4.35GB? IIRC, your Asus should be a perfectly fine burner for the task. Maybe try burning at a slightly slower speed, too (not too much slower--very slow speeds tend to be worse on modern drives).
 
Cerb said:
Try DVD-R DL, maybe? Are the maps really >4.35GB? IIRC, your Asus should be a perfectly fine burner for the task. Maybe try burning at a slightly slower speed, too (not too much slower--very slow speeds tend to be worse on modern drives).
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It has to be DVD+R DL and its 7.82 GB. Ive burned at the slowest speed. Didnt know that could cause an issue, i'll try a speed higher.
 
Could also be a flaky drive. I had a 2004 Toyota/JBL drive that wouldn't read anything reliably except stamped discs. I had the drive swapped out under warranty and it worked perfectly with burned discs after that.
 
I have a Pioneer A05 that I paid $350 for I think in 2003 or 2004 (and an LG CD-RW from 2001 for $250; could read even the worst discs that failed on other drives). Only 4x, but quality stuff. You can pretend that's how much good burners still cost and get the OEM disc 😛
 
Eug said:
Could also be a flaky drive. I had a 2004 Toyota/JBL drive that wouldn't read anything reliably except stamped discs. I had the drive swapped out under warranty and it worked perfectly with burned discs after that.
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Toyota makes drives??
 
Since he was talking about a Lexus, I mentioned my Toyota. It was a stock drive in the Toyota, as part of a JBL sound system, hence my Toyota / JBL description. I don't know who the manufacturer of the drive was.

The point was that it had serious problems reading burned discs, but a replacement was fine. It could be his problem too, that his discs are mostly fine, but his drive isn't.
 
Not sure where you got the map update from. But if you made a copy of it, it may have copy protection. If so, try making it with CloneCD from slysoft.com .. if it still won't work, then maybe you need to obtain a factory DVD .. I looked and Ebay has a lot of them for around $150 and some are actually Lexus dealers that are selling them.
 
bruceb said:
Not sure where you got the map update from. But if you made a copy of it, it may have copy protection. If so, try making it with CloneCD from slysoft.com .. if it still won't work, then maybe you need to obtain a factory DVD .. I looked and Ebay has a lot of them for around $150 and some are actually Lexus dealers that are selling them.
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Yeah im going to try a couple more burns with alcohol 52% and if it still doesnt work i'll just find one on ebay. It sucks because 2001-2003 is a gen 2/3 disc and they are much harder to find for cheap. It actually has 10.1 loaded off my burned disc it just has an error when you enter in a destination.
 
The problem is not the drives, the problem is the source DVD. It has copy protection, so a very specific procedure has to be followed.

Nav systems, specially Denso's, are very picky, and the copy protection scheme is complicated. I don't remember all the steps (haven't done it in years) but you need a good decrypter to make that perfect image, and alcohol or blindwrite to burn the image back.
 
My concern is noise.. I'm wondering if anyone can suggest the most SILENT internal DVD drive.

From my experience, the only truly quiet ones i've seen are the Asus External USB versions. Every internal DVD drive I've seen is obnoxiously loud.
 
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