Digerati, my post was a follow-up. The listed units were mediums, no burners. Look up in the thread.

About the noise: The C't tests in sone and I have two figures. The first is reading CDs and the second is reading Video-DVDs.

Asus 5,9/2,8 sone
LG 8,2/2,7 sone
Lite-On 7,4/1,7 sone
OptiArc 8,0/7,9 sone
Pioneer 6,9/0,9 sone
Plextor 7,7/7,7 sone
Samsung 6,1/1,6 sone

Thank you jojo

I am surprised by the results. This LG model is nearly last overall, many consider it a quiet brand. Overall the quietest on average seems to be Samsung and Pioneer, given these models.

Could you do a similar table of overall quality & reliability results? You mentioned Plextor was best in the test. I would expect Pioneer to be good as well?

Thanks

Pioneer finally released a fancy-bezel retail-kit SATA version of their drive in Japan right now. I have an IDE version of the a09 drive and it is much quieter than all other drives I've used.

Looks like I'll be getting this one from Cokefans.

I will consider to buy this one, the only thing is I would prefer an external (USB) DVD burner but they are also more expensive.

Thanks jojo for your "sone" table where Pioneer is the quietest DVD reader and 3:rd quietest CD reader of the lot.

just put it in a fanless alum enclosure.

Remember the latter figures from the c't test are for 1x dvd playback.

If you use a data dvd, the drive will read at 8-20x (depending on read strategy, part of the disk, etc).

This will be incredibly loud, esp. in the case of LiteOn.

I'd recommend Pioneer myself.

Pioneers do not write DVD-RAM. RAM is the most reliable (through hardware means) media for modifying disk contents.
What DVD writer is good at RW writing quality and can write to DVD-RAM?