Hi All,
I’m getting started with DVD burning - my first need is to make periodic offsite backups for small business data, about 20 gig so far. On a WinXP Pro system.
Amongst the vast choices of drives, can you suggest or recommend some candidate DVD writers?
Reliability is important; I’m willing to spend $ for that. Speed would help; I’m willing to spend some on that too.
Thnx
Welcome to the forum 
the main factor to have a best quality is to buy high quality media (Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim are the very best), because any burner writes good hi quality media.
If you are interested also in checking writing quality, maybe you can buy a liteon drive. If you can afford, a Plextor can be a good option, because it’s very accurate for testing writing quality.
Stefan, you might consider one of the newer 18x drives, like the Samsung SH-182D, although I would do my data backups only at the rated speed of the medias. It seems the Samsung (with a registry trick in the corresponding thread) can also do quality scanning under CD-Speed 4.60, so I consider that a necessity to check the quality of your burns with certain mids and speeds.
I formerly would have recommended BenQ because of its low jitter when burning media, but BenQ has been largely pulled, so probably isn’t available. Otherwise, I would have recommended a 1655.
Correction: as Geno pointed out, the BenQ is still available in Europe, although very difficult to find in the U.S. 
The Benq 1650/55 is still available in Europe 
I would recommand BenQ 1650/1655 or NEC 4550/4551.
There are several good drive as has been mentioned. You do not have to spend a lot of money and can get top quality drives for about 30-40$. there are a few to stay away from (aopen, btc etc.) but media is more important. Not only do you have to get good media but you have to find good media that your drive likes. Thats why scanning is important (to verify that it is burning good). I would defanatlly get a drive that can scan (liteon, some plextors, benq etc).
Hi All,
Thanks for the suggestions and info.
Much obliged.
Hope you make the best choice suited for you.