New DVD burner. Should I keep Combo?

#1

Hi guys! This is my first post, but I´ve been reading a lot of good stuff here for the past month or so! Here´s my situation: I´m looking into buying my first DVD burner (my son has one) and am not sure if I should (need to) keep my Combo drive - IDE LG 4480B. I´m only keeping it if it does something BETTER than my new DVD burner, since I prefer not to have IDE cables in my system. I mainly want to back up movies on DVD´s and data, pics, mp3´s, DivX´s on CD´s.
I´m looking into these burners:
1- Samsung 203D
2- Pioneer 212D
The sammy is the cheapest one (about 20%), the easiest to find and from what I´ve been reading does everything well.
The Pioneer is not very good overall, but excells at burning DVD´s form 8x to 12x.
So, is the Pioneer much better at burning DVD´s? (I can´t find the 215D)
And should I keep my Combo drive to work with any of these two burners?
Thanks a lot in advance!

P.S.- Liteon is almost impossible to get around here and BenQ is kinda rare as well.

#2

No replies?! So, can a Combo drive (LG 4480B) do anything better than a new DVD burner? Can it burn or read CD´s better than a Pioneer 212D? Please let me know if I´m posting this on the wrong forum!! Thanks

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
Welcome onboard rodrigo207. :iagree: :clap:
This forum is OK for your thread. :iagree:
If you keep your combo, it is just possible that it might be better than the Pioneer for CDR’s.
So you could add the Pioneer for DVD’s & get the best of both worlds.
If wanting to have just the one drive, then maybe the 203 would be the better option.

#4

Thanks zebadee for the welcome and the reply!
That´s what I was thinking, but had to be sure! My drive burns good enough CD´s for what I need (mp3, photo and data) so I guess I should go for best possible DVD´s. I really like the 203D overall performance and the idea of not having IDE cables anymore, but I guess the 212D would fit my needs better as you say.
Thanks again… for a second (2 days!!) I thought no one was going to answer!!!

#5

I also have an LG GCC-4480B and from my experience with it, I can tell you that this drive is an excellent reader for CDs. For DVDs it’s good also but it’s quite slow; burners can read more faster. And for burning CDs it’s okay but I have seen much better burns with my GSA-4160B and my new GSA-H62N.

So if you are going to use it as reader, use it. I don’t know how the Pioneers or Samsungs write CDs so you should do some testing to see which one is better. :wink:

#6

Thanks juan!!
From what I read the Samsung is a really good CD burner. And the Pioneer isn´t very good. The thing is that I never had a single CD that didn´t run on any other drive (work, friend´s, DVD player, car cd player…). So I guess that is good enough for me (for now!). So I guess I should go with the best DVD burner since I want it mostly to back up movies. On the other hand… I like the overall performance and the fact that it´s cheaper and a lot easier to get of the Samsung better!!