dvd speeds/price?

[petes28]

i've been told that for dvd performance, since all dvds are read at 1x, that the speed really doesn't matter.. is this true? if so, what's the diff between say the 16x pioneer and a 12x acer (or anything else). is the price diff. really worth it?

 

[madthumbs]

The faster ones tend to be noisier, and have better fast forward and rewind search (smoother). The advantage will be when DVD is actually used for software and until then the speed is best for ripping movies (extraction). I would look for a quiet highly rated drive like Toshiba. The Pioneer's appear to have a problem with audio extraction and other things. Check reviews to be sure. Don't forget that you can use the drive for cd's as well, and you may want speed for that as well.

 

[Soccerman]

if for some reason you wanted to:

1) rip a DVD to DivX or something
2) put a normal CDROM in the DVDROM drive

you would want higher DVD read speeds, becuase it basically means that the discs are spun faster, which means CDROM read speeds are higher (16x drives have 40x CDROM speeds).

 

[Ian@CDRlabs]

I have yet to see a 16x DVD-ROM actually hit 16x.. let alone 14x. I'm still waiting for the new DVD-116 from Pioneer. That might be better.

Anyway to save a few bucks you might want to look at the 10x or 12x DVD-ROMs. There are many that are very good and are usually cheaper than the 16x ones.

 

[kami]

I've had my 5x/32x Toshiba forever and it gives me no problems. I can rip a 2 hour movie in around 15-20mins. It also doesn't make a peep....literally NO NOISE.

 

[zkmusa]

Yes, Toshibas are great drives.

I have a 1x drive (yes... I bought it around 3.5 years ago), and it is great. At that time, there was a lot of hype that DVD-ROMs would replace CD-ROMs within a year for software, so I decided to buy one. Big mistake.

Although my drive is great for playing movies (although I rarely use it these days since I have a real DVD player), it is very slow reading CDs (1st generation drives read CDs at 8x) and cannot read burned CDs (1st generation drives cannot read CD-Rs or CD-RWs).

None of these problems are around with today's DVD-ROM drives. They read CDs quickly and read burned CD-Rs perfectly.

I think you should probably not go with the fastest DVD drive around, but instead go with a reasonably priced drive. Until DVD-ROM software becomes more widespread, don't waste your money on the fastest drive; just get a good drive.

Hope my 2 cents helped!