dl dvd drives

[baxter]

Looking for a good DL dvd drive, any recomendations?

[LordRPI]

Pioneer DVR-108

Works like a charm for me :)

[Leo 69]

NEC-3520A is your choice, I guess. It's based on a completely new chip than 3500A and hackers are currently digging in its firmware to unlock
many of its (locked by the manufacturer) capabilities.
For more info on this particular matter visit :
www.micheldeboer.nl/firmware/index.html
www.rpc1.org
I use this drive and it works just perfectly... With modified firmware
I've flashed recently it burns 8x DVD-R @ 12x with no problem :)

[Mug Funky]

yeah, the DVR-108 is a nice drive (cheap too!), but it's not without its quirks:

- use an 80-wire cable with it (pioneer flat out do not support this drive if you don't use one).

- make sure it's set to Master - it'll get stroppy if it isn't.

- it's very finicky about the media it gets. though it'll burn pretty much anything quite well, it has real problems reading -R media burnt on Lite-on or Sony drives (you should use +R with these anyway, as they suck ass at -R). it's good with pressed discs, including dodgy Bankok pirate discs (not that i have any...).

- burn no faster than 6x, because it burns in speed "zones" (Z-CLV mode), and the faster zones can often have very high error rates.


also, you might want to flash it's firmware with Piodata's 108 firmware - this is the exact same unit, only it supports bitsetting on +R discs, meaning you can get shitty old standalones to read +R discs because it'll think they're DVD-ROM booktype. the pioneer firmwares don't support bitsetting +R, even though they will set +R DL discs to DVD-ROM...

aside from the above, this is a very cool drive, and probably the best bang for your buck by a long way (i haven't used the 109... that might be a better drive still, but from what i've read it's not a big jump on the 108. what i'd like out of a pioneer drive is Z-CAV writing, as this will speed things up a lot, and get rid of those nasty "zones" that you get when burning faster than 6x).