The top 5 Optical drives of 2008 (CD Freaks members choice)

vote for Optiarc AD-72xx series and HG 55N
they are excellent burners

Like many others my vote goes for the Optiarc AD-72xx.

If i had tested the pioneer drives maybe i would vote for them. They seem to be very acurate doind their job, and what concerns the quality of construction they are evolving. Theres a review for those drives around here?

Same here, I always liked anything /NEC/Optiarc made. Even though I only have 1 Optiarc drive, it is better for me than the Samsung 20X drive. It was only about 25.00USD ,, I got it when it had free shipping.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827118014

There are reviews of most of the front running drives on the CD Freaks Frontpage.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/reviews/

Optiarc 7200 for me

it took some time till I found this thread. however, my 2008 favourites are the Lite-On 20A1 series and the sammy SH-203 ones. My SH-S203B is still the best drive in my pc tower

there are not nec,why?

The NEC drives are now called Sony NEC Optiarc and you'll find them listed as Optiarc AD-71xx series and Optiarc AD-72xx series in the poll.

I did some research as I was searching for my new drives and I wanted to make sure I had one with a solid reputation for dependability (=NEC, =Renesas chipset) and found that not all Optiarcs are the NEC variety. The 71XX had a Mediatek, while the 72xx was indeed NEC.

I went with the lightscribe version 7201A and am very pleased thus far. I would have gone for and LG but the ones I saw were the Panasonic chipset variety and I don't know if that is quite the same as the quality of the renesas one. Because of what I read about it on this site, I went with the ASUS 1814bl instead. It is nearly SILENT- even when I put my ear up to it!

Not exactly. The 717x drives had a NEC chipset while the 719x drives were just rebadged LiteOns

Thanks everyone for taking the time to vote and voice your opinions in this thread.

We have our top 5 drives of 2008

• 1. Pioneer DVR-115/215 series
• 2. Samsung SH-S203 series
• 3. Optiarc AD-72xx series
• 4. Pioneer DVR-116/216 series
• 5. Lite-On 20A4 series.

Also a notable mention for the LG Blu ray series. It is nice to see these next generation drives becoming popular.

I used this thread to help me decide on what new drive to get to replace my failing Lite-On 20A1h. I spent a lot of time reading up on the drives mentioned in this poll, reading reviews, forum threads, other info on the web, made a list of what I thought the pros/cons of the various drives were, shopped around for what looked like the best choices to see what the prices were from what vendors, then made what I thought was an informed decision on what the best drive for me to get. I spent about a week on all this.

I decided on getting a Pioneer DVR-115, buying it from Pioneer's own website with 1 cent shipping, that cost me about $40 total. It was actually the most expensive of the drives I was considering but I thought it was going to be the best drive for me.

Yet after all that, I discover today after getting my new drive, that it does not support doing what I consider to be an essential feature of any DVD drive - that is work with NeroCD/DiscSpeed to examine the quality of burned discs. This is something I did frequently with my old burner to check new media at various speeds to make sure I am buying "good" media, confirm that I am using my burner at its best speed for the media, used to check problematic discs that don't play right etc etc etc. I can't believe how this critical issue is not mentioned in discussions on this drive, at least not right out in the open. There is even a thread on media/quality/performance of this drive that is over 40 pages long, yet not even in that thread afaik is it pointed out that this drive CANNOT actually do the testing which is used in the thread to judge the quality of the discs that it burns.

I hope that my posting this here will help someone else considering buying this drive to keep this issue in mind if it is something that they need with a new DVD burner, so that they can steer clear of this drive if this is a function that they need. Although I do not understand all of the issues, I am learning now that Pioneer drives have such a terrible reputation for "scanning" that NeroDiscSpeed has removed support for them. If I had known that, I would have avoided all Pioneer drives in general since I need to be able to use my burner for checking media quality.

I also respectfully suggest that this kind of information be stressed in future reviews, and be mentioned right up front on the first page of things like the "Post your scans and questions here" thread. Perhaps this issue is mentioned somewhere, but in light of my experience it is not mentioned in an obvious way, and if it was spelled out more clearly it would have saved me (& hopefully others as well) from buying something which lacks a feature which might be considered essential by some people.

Also, I realize that many people have multiple DVD drives in their systems, one being for example this Pioneer drive which they use for burning, and another type of drive which they use for "scanning" with NeroDiscSpeed. In theory that would be an option for me too - to now go buy yet ANOTHER drive so I can use Discspeed, but even putting aside the additional expense, that is not an option for me because I have no additional drive bays to use. I do have another drive that I could take out - that is a Liteon CDR burner - but I need that drive in order to get decent DAE & speed with EAC!! Unless someone can point me in the direction of DVD burner which can do decent DAE, give me at least 8x reading speed with EAC in secure mode, AND work with NeroDiscSpeed, I am stuck.......and everything I've learned so far tells me that there are no DVD drives made that can do the type of DAE perfromance & speed with EAC that I need, so therefore I need to keep my CDR drive.....correct me if I am wrong though.

Thanks.

You can go with a LiteOn DVDRW drive. They are very good for audio extraction with EAC; they are very fast even in secure mode. Also, they CAN do quality scans using Nero CD-DVD Speed.

wow!!!! now you're talking :-)

that is awesome, which drive is that???

i used to have a 20a1h and all i could get out of it with EAC was about 2-3x!

thanks very much!

The drive is an DH-20A4H. I remember my LH-20A1H being so slow sometimes but I think that it depends on the disc inserted. By the way in the above picture, I extracted the last track of the CD, the first track usually starts between 5-6x.

Thanks very much. I guess I should have seen what drive it was from reading your signature but I only just noticed that now! I will look into that. Maybe there is another drive in my future for this PC after all. I'd really like to add a good DVD "scanner", now that I understand the limitations of the Pioneer.

Definitely the EAC read speed is way slower on discs with problems in comparison to clean discs and that makes sense. But I could never get above around 2.x-something with good solid CDRs on my 20a1h though. And if the disc had problems it would really crawl.

Thanks again for your help.

Thanks again for the info.

I decided to get one, on sale at newegg with free shipping. I had been getting pretty solid EAC extraction with the 52537S but problems burning with it, so considering the burn probs with that old drive and how much I would like to get a DVD drive that can let me do DVD media quality scans, I'll sacrifice the EAC speed if need be, and I'll see what I can get with EAC on the new 20A4H drive.

I tried testing the 20A4H with some CDRs in EAC but I'm only getting around 2-3x on start of CDRs and only rising to around 3-6x at the middle/ending tracks - with wide variance on some media or discs going faster or slower than others - but wondering why in general my results are so much slower than yours had me thinking.

My results are with the choice for "drive is capable of retrieving C2 information" turned off. If I set the C2 choice to YES though I could get around double those speeds though. You must have this set to YES?

For years I remember reading in various EAC guides that you always want to turn this OFF regardless of whether EAC detects it as a read feature or not since many drives do not properly report all C2 errors regardless of what EAC thinks from that initial "detect read features" test, unless you know FOR SURE that your drive is a good one for reporting C2 errors, so I always turned this off for all my drives except my old workhorse plextor ultraplex 40max (still alive and kicking in my older Pentium2 PC!).

I decided to try EAC's additional "examine C2 features" test using a scratched disc, and that test seems to work, in that the drive finds spots with C2 errors, so maybe it is safe to enable this after all (?). I also tried testing this on the Pioneer DVR-115 and it also seems to spot C2s so I even tested that drive on more CDRs with EAC - and I'm getting even faster extraction speeds than the lite-on with the pioneer!! I guess I have a lot more reading/thinking/researching to do as to whether it is OK to have this setting in EAC set to on or off. Maybe my recollections on this were based more on what I read way back when but newer drives of today don't have the same issues??? Probably a subject for another thread if it isn't already (I have to do a lot more research).

In the meantime I can now move back to doing quality scans of the test DVDs I burned in the pioneer last week, thx to having a new lite-on DVD burner that works with Disc/CDspeed

Nope, my drive has the C2 setting disabled, accurate stream and drive caches... are enabled. I have found a method to make the drive faster in case the drive is so slow in EAC. First, load your CD into the drive, then open CDSpeed, hit the Start button and when you hear that your drive is spinning, hit cancel. Now go to EAC and rip, it should be faster now. It seems that the drive must spin before ripping otherwise you are going to obtain this slow speed.

Interesting. THX for that tip. I will take a look at that.

Why isn't plextor on here to vote for it? I have a Plextor 850A and it is the best dvd burner i've ever had. Just thought Plextor should be included.

Your Plextor 850A is a LiteOn iHAP322 drive, so it's on the list already.

Just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work you guys put into testing media and drives here on this site. A while back I would try to read and understand exactly what you guys are doing but when I realized that your testing standards are extremely stringent and accurate I knew it was much much easier to leave the tech stuff up to you guys and just take your advice.

Now I just look for the editors choice drives and recommended media and buy them.

It would be nice however if there were an option on the site that allows someone to search for specific category i.e. "editors choice", "safe buy" or even be able to click a link and get just reviews for dvdrw drives or dvd recorders etc. I know I'm bein a bit lazy, but when I look for a drive here I find myself going through the archives and looking at the reviews of every dvdrw/software/dvdr/external/hd/bray to find what I am looking for (usually just a dvdrw) and see how it gets rated. It doesn't seem like it would be a daunting task to have links for the categories stated above. If I'm way off on this then just ignore that part of my statement and accept my praise.

This thread is perfect as I was just looking around for a new drive or two to put into a prospective build.

Thanks for all the info and help, you guys really make it much more manageable to select drives, media and even software/hardware. Also the vast majority of the people here are very patient and friendly even when dealing with dummies like me. Keep up the good work.

I also would like to thank the staff of this site for the testing, thank you!

---

Last edited by Seán; 07-04-2009 at 23:42. Reason: Removed suspicious image

whats a good ide for reading old dvds and cds? or what ide has the best at reading and reconizing dvds?

Dee, 2009 version is long due don't you think ? Maybe this time with BD burner as well !