StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm seriously considering buying one and I can only find one review. Any opinions?

The DL DVD drives right now suffer from two problems:

1) They are slow to write to DL media
2) DL Media is almost impossible to find and is over $7 a disc

Both of these problems will be fixed with time, so might I suggest that you wait for the next generation? They should be out around the time that DL media falls in price (Fall-Winter 2004).

DL DVD also has a higher error rate, so yeah, wait a generation or two.

I went ahead and bought it, not because of the DL capability, but because the consensus on Ars Technica was that the NEC burners are decent and the price was only $88 shipped from Newegg.

I figured that $18 (the price difference between it and the 2500A single layer burner) was worth it because I might actually want to burn a DL disc at some point.

The price makes me want to cry when I think about the $600 cost of my first CD burner (Yamaha 4260 SCSI and card)

Gad, and I remember paying ~$200 for my CD writer. But I was the envy of all my friends; while they were still piddling around with 2x and 4x, I was blazing at 12x!

...and still am.

To let you know how long ago that was, the Yamaha was in my state of the art AMD K6-233 system.

Hah, I just remembered back then how people would be like "omg can't do anything while it's burning or I'll get a coaster" and I'd sit and laugh at them because my burner wasn't susceptible to buffer underrun errors.

Uraniun235 wrote:Hah, I just remembered back then how people would be like "omg can't do anything while it's burning or I'll get a coaster" and I'd sit and laugh at them because my burner wasn't susceptible to buffer underrun errors.

After I got the Yamaha, I bought a SCSI Plextor 40Max reader to go with it. Thanks to the magic of SCSI, I could copy discs all day long while using the PC for other things.

About the NEC;

I couldn't locate any DL media locally, but I made several burns using both CMC Magnetics manufactured Fuji 8x +R media and Taiyo Yuden manufactured Maxell 4x rated -R media at 8x of movies and data.

Both of my DVD drives are incompatible with Nero's Disc Quality Test, so I don't have a test report.

However, all of the data discs turned out perfect according to Nero's data verification and can be read by both the burner and the reader in my desktop and the reader in my laptop. The movie discs play in both my Toshiba SD1800 player and in my friend's Cambridge Soundworks home theater system.


So far I give the drive a big thumbs up.