I fried my DVD drive. Suggestions?

Lor · Post by **Lor** » Tue Feb 11, 2003 5:54 am

Ok, yesterday I botched a 12V-to-5V ("pass-through", or so I thought) adapter and fed 12VDC to the 5V line of my DVD drive. Needless to say, I fried it.

So now I'm in the market for a new DVD reader. I only really use it for watching films, so I need it to be very quiet (ideally inadible) when playing films from DVD, but noise in other circumstances is not really a problem.

If possible, it should have reasonable DVD-ripping performance (unless this means it has to be noisy when playing films), and it would help if it could be made region-free.

I don't care about CD reading speed, as long as it's decent.

Any suggestions?
Here in Italy I probably find Asus, LG, Lite-on and Pioneer readers easily, and perhaps NEC, Teac, Toshiba and Sony with a little more effort.

seishino · Post by **seishino** » Tue Feb 11, 2003 11:31 am

Don't let this comment short circuit this discussion: there is very little information about silent CDVD drives. However, are you sure you didn't just trip a fuse? I'm willing to bet if you poke around the board with a multimeter, you will find a chip with one line in, and one line out, that has a resistance of 1. You'd have to solder either a new fuse in place or bridge it with a wire (at which point you really could kill your drive).

I just haven't come across many modern electronics that didn't have some sort of fuse protection against power surges...

-C

Lor · Post by **Lor** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 2:15 am

Alas, no. The one of the chips is cracked and burnt. The PCB area near the chip is black and there are at least a couple of capacitors that are gone.

Lor · Post by **Lor** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 2:21 am

Ok, I'll start with a few candidates:

1. The Sony DDU-1621. Reported by some to be very silent, but it's not a very modern or high-quality drive in other respects. The region-free patches are RPC-1, which is not a good solution because it requires patching software as well as hardware, and (I think) won't read some region 1 DVD's.

2. The Lite-on 166s. More modern, and it has the following improvements over the previous version, which means that at least they tried: "Acoustic noise improvement; Tray in out noise improvement; Symmetric suspension points ( good for vibration)." The region-free hack on this one is RPC-1 as well, unforrtunately.

Anyone else care to share his/her ideas or experiences?

mudboy · Post by **mudboy** » Fri Feb 14, 2003 4:28 am

I have the Samsung SM-348 and it is fantastic. Very quiet, plus, buy the DVD drive and you get a CD-RW for free

Pete

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Fri Feb 14, 2003 8:34 am

Use the search. This took about ten seconds.

jamoore9 · Post by **jamoore9** » Fri Feb 14, 2003 10:54 am

After reading the other thread on this board about DVD/CDR drives, I went with an LG 48x CDR and a Toshiba 1712 DVD. For right now (its a long story) I've had to switch back to my old Dell, which is considerably louder than my new rig. But I've watched The Matrix and the Others on the Toshiba and couldn't hear the disc spin even a little. I mention that its in the old box because its got a loud PSU fan, so I might have not heard the DVD among all that noise. If you've got a pretty quiet rig, it might be different.

The LG, BTW, is super-smooth. I defintely recommend it. Its audible when spinning during games and such, but it purrs like kitten. Its kinda satisfying, actually.

efcoins · Post by **efcoins** » Mon Feb 24, 2003 3:58 pm

You should use
http://www.tonec.com/cds/

it lets you set the read speed for CD / DVD from software. A 48 speed Drive operating at 8 o

r 4 speed is silent.

Lor · Post by **Lor** » Mon Apr 28, 2003 6:03 pm

I'm now trying out a Toshiba 1712 for playing DVD's.

It's pretty good. Not inaudible, but pretty good. True, it's not yet case-mounted, so I'm not hearing the effect of case vibrations, but I can only just hear it above from about 2 feet away. On top of that, the noise is a nice non-intrusive whoosh that my ears find it easy to get used to.

The only other noise makers in the PC are a sunon ptb4 fan at about 7V in the PSU and a Barracuda IV 40 GB suspended above a foam bed. Plus, unfortunately, the monitor (!), which buzzes audibly (it's a LG flatron 795+).