CD-Writers

[DentyCracker]

I bought an AOPEN CRW9420 IDE drive last Feb. for a lot of money after my 10GB HD crashed. It was a 4x4x20 RICOH 7040A inside. Like Alessandro I "upgraded" it to a Ricoh 7060A (6x4x24)with the aid of a new firmware and a hady little program called rmorph. It works well and - get this it rips audio faster than anything else I've seen -up to 20X on the outer tracks of long CDs (70+ min) I've overburned with it using CD-Manager under BeOS (77 min worth of audio). I'm thinking of buying the yamaha 8x SCSI drive as I think SCSI CD-Rs are reasonably priced (unlike Hard Drives)
i've also had good experiences with Yamaha 4x4x16 SCSI drive.

[Turbo]

Hands down... Plextor Rules!
Also you get a super utility called CDRES-Q that you can back up your entire system to CD's. Burns a complete image while spanning disks if needed. Lifesaver for sure. You can create bootable CD's even. And... CDRES-Q writes in DOS too!!!
I've owned so many CD-R's I couldn't even begin list them. (worst one was HP.) Since switching to Plextor I've not had a single failure. Not one in over 1,000 cd burns. Super value and performance. I have switched all of systems to Plextors because of their quality, performance and dependability.
I use SCSI... but they now have a new IDE CD/RW.
I agree with GURM... why bother with RW (because of the cost/price and speed) and I hate Direct CD too. It has a nice feature of being able to packet write to the CD burner like a floppy... but... it is a resource hog and very very unstable. CD media is too cheap to bother dedicating the drive for packet writing. OK... once in a while I use it... but... it's extremely rare.
PLEXTOR is the leader and always has been.
I hope they start making DVD drives soon.
My intent here is not to flame or step on anyone's opinion, but rather to express mine and encourage others to enjoy the benefits of my experiences in this area.
Turbo

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486x33 OC'd to P3@450
8mb 30 pin simms @60ns
cdrom 2x
sb16
540mb hd EIDE
G400Max
14.4 modem
svga monitor 14"
mouse
keyboard
dos 5.0
win3.0
now you can stop drooling (sheesh)

[Turbo]

I forgot to mention that the DAE is flawless and FAST with Plextor drives. In fact... superior. Their new Plextor Manager software makes it so simple.
see:
http://www.plextor.com/ms40pr.htm

For information on the 8x4x32 IDE CD-R/W drive see:
http://www.plextor.com/pr8432.htm

For information on the CDRES-Q backup and restore utility see:
http://www.plextor.com/prresq.htm

I used to use Direct CD for backups... with the same problems as HollyBerri. CDRES-Q is so superior. I can restore all 18Gb on three drives and six partitions in twenty four minutes after booting from the CDRES-Q backup CD that was created with CDRES-Q. It restores to absolute PERFECTION with only minimal user input.
Adaptec has a backup and restore application also. it's called Take Two that is quite good.
CDRES-Q is a co-developed utility by Symantec and Plextor and is similar (if not part of) Norton Ghost.
No... I don't work for Plextor. I just love their products... like Matrox... only much better.

Turbo


------------------
486x33 OC'd to P3@450
8mb 30 pin simms @60ns
cdrom 2x
sb16
540mb hd EIDE
G400Max
14.4 modem
svga monitor 14"
mouse
keyboard
dos 5.0
win3.0
now you can stop drooling (sheesh)

[carlmeister]

My vote is for Plextor and Yamaha. I feel the Plextor is better, well worth the extra money. Also there CD Rom drives are well worth the money, my 40x max does DAE at about 8x speed

[agallag]

Minor note...

Plus CDRW can't properly handle cd-audio.

I wrote an audio CDRW once just to try it out. Couldn't play it in my car (which would've been nice for constantly changing mixes, guess it's going to be a MamboX for me), but it played just fine on my Sony 5 disc changer (Model CDP-C345).

So far this is the only audio cd player I've found that can play CDRW discs, but at least it's proof that it can work.

[Gurm]

Actually I've run into trouble just trying to get audio tracks onto a CDRW after I've used it for other stuff...

*shrug*

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[agallag]

I guess I should have mentioned, I did that audio cdrw on my yamaha 4416S using Nero...

[mlody]

Hi there, I'm gad damm happy with Plextor 8432 IDE cd-rw. I've been using it for about 2 months (about 100cd's copied so far) and no problems AT ALL. It's working flawlessly with my asus 40x cd-rom and I have no problems with DAE at 8x. I had before Panasonic 4xcd-r 8xcd-rom and it also worked fine, but I needed faster burner, and I chose Plextor. It was very good shoot

[Gasoline]

My $.02 worth. PLEXTOR, PLEXTOR, PLEXTOR. Fabulous performance, great tech support, firmware upgrades, and software upgrades. They may be pricey, but you get what you pay for.
Second choice would be for a Yamaha.

If you can afford it go with SCSI if not go with the IDE Plextor 8x4x32.

More burning programs will work with Yamaha and Plextor than any others out there. Nero, CDRWIN, Easy Creator 4.0, Feurio, etc...
If you buy a noname burner then you run the risk of having compatibility problems with quality CD-R and CD-RW software.