New DVD burner. Should I keep Combo?

[rodrigo207]

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.

[rodrigo207]

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

[zebadee]

Hi
Welcome onboard rodrigo207.
This forum is OK for your thread.
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.

[rodrigo207]

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!!!

[juancdg]

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.

[rodrigo207]

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!!