Which DVD drive would you recommend ?

[Rohde]

I'm currently considering buying a DVD drive.
It must have the following features/properties :

- Medium price
- Not too noisy (important) (must be tray, not slot-in)
- Must be able to read both CD-RWs and DVDs
- Reasonably fast (8-12x, not 16x speed)
- Must be able to change region (without limit).

The noise part is especially important. I currently own a 32x pioneer slot-in CD-ROM drive and it is incredibly noisy, so I won't even consider a 40x slot-in.

Any suggestions/comments ?

Torben R

[windigo]

buying the earlier versions of dvds has its own incompatibilties with some dvds but anyhting around 6x should be unlocked also i think the asus dvds are unlocked also and there are various websites that offer downloadable software that flashes the drives rom to no regions a little iffy here
so my suggestion is to look for drives around the 6 to 10x speed from asus personally I have a 16x pioneer scsi drive which is region locked but I only have or rent dvds within region 1 so thats no problem for me

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MSI K7TPro2 Duron 750@900
512Ram G400DH32mb
Pioneer SCSI 16xDVD
msn messenger id: mkanashta

[dZeus]

16x Pioneer SCSI DVD???? which model number is that?

I've got a 10x SCSI myself (the 305S), and indeed I'm suffering of the region locked problem as well... and for me this is a bitg problem

[Rohde]

There are a many sites with region hacks, for example :

http://regionhacks.datatestlab.com/
http://perso.club-internet.fr/farzen.../dvd/dvdfi.htm
But they don't seem to include your drive dZeus

Btw: I'm looking for an IDE DVD-drive.

Anyone have specific models/brands that they like ?

[dZeus]

A regionhack for my drive won't appear until after Pioneer released an updated firmware for it. WHy? The people who hack the firmwares don't have a tool to dump the firmware that's in the drive...

[Rohde]

Ok, didn't know that was the connection.
Hope for you they find a bug soon so they can release the new firmware

I think I'll go for an ASUS DVD-E612. In a review (and also from other sources), it says that you can hack the region protection by simply removing a "test" jumper.

It's probably a bit noisy, but I'll just have to find a way to live with it (and if it gets to bad, it has a feature that lets you turn the speed down)

TR

[az]

Uhh yeah, I'd want a quiet DVD drive as well

Suggestions, please!

AZ

[Guru]

Anything from Toshiba!

BTW avoid Hitachi DVD drives they suck!

[Greebe]

Several of us beta testers use the Toshiba SD-M1402 12x DVD drive. It's cheap (~$65 USD) and reads everything.

I give it two thumbs up

[dancray]

is the toshiba region free?

[dZeus]

If you had followed the links as posted on this page, you could have found out by yourself that it is possible to make that particular drive regionfree.

And I'm not really advising the Pioneer 305S to anyone... when reading CDROMs it's very noisy, and it's very slow on mode-2 CDs as well... Go for the toshiba

[Wombat]

My Pioneer is noisy when reading data CD's. But it's very quiet when playing DVD's or audio CD's. Maybe what you need is just a program that limits the maximum speed of the drive. I think Plextor's software does this, but I'm not sure.

[Greebe]

The drive I mentioned above is very quiet and yes, can be made region free.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

dZeus, what are mode-2 CDs??

[Greebe]

CDrom XA (ie Mode 2) def.
http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/...=CD%2DROM%20XA