We just bought a new DELL Vostro 420 with one of these OEM H&L GH30N DVD drives in it. It appears to be a piece of junk and Dell just sent us a new one, identical to it as a replacement under warranty.
So far, we have noticed two problems:
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it won’t write an audio CD worth a damn with either Windows Media Player, Roxio Creator, or Nero 7 Essentials. We went through a stack of Sony CD-Rs trying to get one that worked for a 4 song demo. We had mostly failures and have had to throw away several CDs (virtually all of them). Ironically, using my DELL Poweredge with a Memorex Lightscribe DVD RW, the same process works fine, using only Media Player to burn the audio CD.
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After replacing the original factory OEM unit with the identical warranty replacement unit, it threw a region code error when we tried to play a standard movie DVD. This may actually be normal, but it tells me that DELL Support does not even bother to set the region code before they ship this piece of worthless junk to you.
Also, we have not been able to find any driver updates, either on the DELL site, by talking to Dell Support last week, or doing our own research.
It’s made by Hitachi - LG, and the manufacturer’s website is here:
http://www.hlds.co.jp/e_index.jsp
That’s all we know so far. Wish Dell would use a higher quality DVD drive, as this one is OEM junk in my opinion.
