Which SATA DVD drive?

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Filias Cupio
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Which SATA DVD drive?

Post by Filias Cupio » Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:40 pm

Finally a decent selection of SATA DVD drives is available in New Zealand. The current options are:
Pioneer DVR-212
LG GSA-H30N
Asustek DRW-1814BLT
Plextor PX-760SA (not really an option, as I can buy four of the other drives for the price of one of these.)

Does anyone have experience of the noise of any of these drives?

Feel free to discuss other SATA DVD drives - others will appreciate it, even if it doesn't do me any good.

mr. poopyhead
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Post by mr. poopyhead » Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:31 pm

i have a plextor PX-755SA and it's pretty quiet. there are extensive settings to reduce noise in their plextools software...

i never thought i'd shell out the cash for a plextor, but their drives are truly top notch... i bought a spindle of 50 cheap DVD+R DL disks without really thinking (clearly i'm a moron) and all i got were 5 coasters before giving up on my NEC 3520A drive... i searched high and low on the interweb trying to find a solution on successfully burning DL disks. the only answer i could find was "buy taiyo yuden/verbatim disks" which are really expensive. so i had a choice... cut my losses on 70 bucks worth of crappy ritek DL DVDs AND buy expensive disks (the nice ones are usually at LEAST $2/disk)... or buy a plextor and make use of the crap disks. buying 50 verbatim disks would pretty much have been the same price as the plextor (got mine for $94 CDN). i haven't had a single coaster yet and successfully backed up a bunch of my movies onto DVD DL.

basically what i'm trying to say is that if you're doing a lot of DL burning, go with the plextor. it'll save you money in the long run. burning 50 ritek disks instead of verbatims will already save you around 50 bucks. i can't guarantee that it will give you perfect results with crappy disks, but so far it hasn't disappointed.

they also have excellent tech support. knowledgeable staff instead of the usual monkeys who ask you a bunch of checklist questions and then escalate you to someone smarter once they've determined that you're NOT a moron... i had to call tech support cause my drive isn't getting along with nero infotool (giving BSOD). otherwise it's fine and may turn out to be software or driver related as opposed to a faulty drive.

sorry if this sounds like an ad or an overly glowing review, but i am really impressed with my first plextor drive.

Filias Cupio
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Post by Filias Cupio » Thu Mar 15, 2007 2:45 pm

Thanks, Mr Poopyhead. As it happens, I'm not expecting to record large numbers of DVDs, so cost of media isn't a big issue for me.

For the record, current prices ($NZ):
Pioneer DVR-212 $68
LG GSA-H30N $73
Asustek DRW-1814BLT $74
Plextor PX-760SA $288

damien
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Post by damien » Fri Apr 06, 2007 3:28 am

Similar situation here is Australia - $50 for most of the standard brands, $220 for the Plextor.

SO what's the best of the rest? The shorter the better too - I don't have a lot of room in the case.

As a bit of a side issue, I use MythTV, so is there a liux utility for tweaking things like max drive speed?

pelago
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Post by pelago » Sat Apr 07, 2007 12:37 pm

damien wrote:As a bit of a side issue, I use MythTV, so is there a liux utility for tweaking things like max drive speed?
You can use hdparm for this I believe (I don't have the exact syntax to hand).

nutball
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Post by nutball » Sat Apr 07, 2007 10:35 pm

There's an NEC SATA DVD drive too, which is ... OK. Nothing stellar, but it's cheap.

vincentfox
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Post by vincentfox » Sat Apr 07, 2007 11:16 pm

I have the LiteON LH-20A1S and it's pretty quiet. Of course, I usually burn at the lowest speed for reliability. About the only feature it's missing I suppose is the LightScribe labelling, I'm not sure how useful that is though.

pelago
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Post by pelago » Sun Apr 08, 2007 9:18 am

nutball wrote:There's an NEC SATA DVD drive too, which is ... OK. Nothing stellar, but it's cheap.
I've been waiting for that drive to come into stock for weeks, but I'm still hopeful!

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Post by Arvo » Sun Apr 08, 2007 11:00 am

Drive noise is more related to disk spinning speed than drive maker (model). If you can use some tool like Nero Drivespeed then you can make any drive virtually silent.

From these four drives presented, I'd choose LG. Plextor is too expensive and has nothing special (unless you need to teach it to recognize and write unsupported media, like stated in above postings - it has so called AutoStrategy option, which by the way was not very efficient for me). LG has much weaker media support, but like you said - this is not problem for you.

Older LG models didn't allow change drive speed, but newer models should - you need to search google to know, does particular model allow speed changing or not.

What I like about LG - it's usually able to read anything, even only remotely resembling CD/DVD :) Nec writers for example are very good writers (for supported media - but they have frequent firmware updates to support more media), but they do not like scratched or othervise broken (including copy protected) CD/DVDs.

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Post by sjoukew » Sun Apr 08, 2007 12:24 pm

I am happy with pioneer. I have had 3 pioneer drives now, very nice drives, never had any problems. They are also not really noisy, compared to the el-cheapo drives I have seen, but they are really far from silent when disks are spinning fast, but what do you expect ??

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Post by jhhoffma » Sun Apr 08, 2007 6:25 pm

mr. poopyhead wrote:i searched high and low on the interweb trying to find a solution on successfully burning DL disks. the only answer i could find was "buy taiyo yuden/verbatim disks" which are really expensive.
I was going to comment and say that I haven't had any problems with my NEC 3520A. Then I realized that I have only burned 3 DL disks so far and they were all Verbatim disks. I hadn't heard anything about problems with other disks. But good to know...

pelago
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Post by pelago » Thu Apr 12, 2007 7:40 am

Anyone know how noisy the LiteOn SH-16A7S-05C is? http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4CQ5

I'm trying to find a black SATA DVD writer, preferably from dabs.com, and it's either that LiteOn, the NEC AD 7170S-0B ( http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4FV0 ) which seems to be permanently out of stock or the HP AH048AT ( http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4DBS ) which is twice the price.

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Post by nutball » Thu Apr 12, 2007 9:35 am

pelago wrote:Anyone know how noisy the LiteOn SH-16A7S-05C is?
Noise doing what? When going hell-for-leather reading a CD/DVD at max speed for installing some software, it's bloody noisy (but then what isn't?). Writing isn't too bad, but it's far from quiet (the NEC is about the same I think). Dunno about the HP, it's too expensive :)

pelago
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Post by pelago » Fri Apr 13, 2007 2:29 pm

I want it for an HTPC and most of its use will be for playing DVD movies at 1x (I assume). I may use it for writing the odd DVD now and then. Are most drives quiet 'enough' at 1x?

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Post by continuum » Fri Apr 13, 2007 4:22 pm

Supposedly compatibility isn't perfect yet, there's one report of a Lite-On LH-20A1S not writing to discs on Ars forums, but I haven't been able to verify this myself yet...

I had no idea NEC's 7170 was already out, I haven't yet seen a review of it on CDRInfo.com yet. Given your choices I'd pick up the Pioneer, but the LG and Asus are question marks on my list-- the LG should be pretty solid, but I don't think it's significantly better or worse than the Pioneer.

Filias Cupio
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Post by Filias Cupio » Sun Apr 15, 2007 5:52 pm

I've now bought the Pioneer drive (DVR-212 ). It didn't work correctly (crashed to reboot) until after I'd upgraded its firmware and the drivers for my motherboard. It is quiter than my IDE combo drive (a LiteOn from a couple of years ago.) I couldn't really say how well it compares with anything else.

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