Thread: DVD Drive Brand

Get A LG or Samsung Dvd Writer. For Me they are the best.

Its pretty difficult to choose a drive based on brands. They have a model number. Though they are OEM drives, manufacturers make an effort to put the specs of the drive of the box. I mentioned this once in other forum, so I will do it here. If someone uses it, its good or else people can resume blindly mentioning company's names:
It depends on how much dvd your planning to burn. I burn on an average of 24 disks a month with speed of 8x-16x on my sony and vertabrim disks. Heard from reliable sources Moser baer version of the liteon drives are pretty much garbage. I am using samsung 203-D and other than PIO/DMA settings conflict (which is conflict many drives to be honest)- I had no issues whatsoever after swapping the PIO/DMA settings via bios and flashing it to the latest firmware. Before that I have used sony IDE cd drive for 5 years and sony IDE dvd drive for one year and they still worked. Hardware failure is something inevitable. One is pretty lucky if one's sata drives last for a year with an average burn of 24 disk a month. My next drive will be a IDE one- I find that way more reliable than sata. Truth be told, there isnt much different SATA and IDE when it comes to a DVD writer. My choice will go for a sony OR samsung drives provided its IDE- some models of Sony are Pioneer's OEM. If your lucky to find it- benq 1650 and 1640 are amazing but they are extinct.
It also depends on the quality of the disks that your burning and using as well. I either use Sony or import Verbatim but now even they are available in India. People use el cheapo disks (in my book that includes moser baer) which gets warmed up so fast and potentially damage the inner parts of the drive- yet they expect the dvd drive to work properly which doesnt do any justice. Now as for dvd drives- Sony DRU-820A is actually OEM BenQ DW1670 with 5x DVD-RAM. If one sees overall best, Nothing beats pioneer and Benq. Unfortunatly manufacturers keep on changing their OEM- so if you want quality drives, equale amount of research is important. We did see Sony selling Pioneer and Benq rebranded OEMs which is a pretty smart and good thing for us since benq and pioneer isnt available here now. In samsung I only found 203-b/d being good, not sure about the new model. If one gets 820A, one should buy it.
Also the life of a drive (any pc hardware for that matter) depends on a good psu with proven peak efficiency and good amperage for the system which is required.

I will suggest only 1

Liteon

they are not only cheap but also better in performance than other brands..

i should prefer Lite-On but its outta stock and taken over by Moser Baer now :P