Hi all,
My old NEC 3500 is in its death throes and I need to replace it ASAP. I’ve been reading over a few threads but I have some specific questions. I’m looking for a replacement drive that’s IDE since I use an external enclosure that only supports IDE.
I’ve been looking at the Samsung SH-S202 (J, I guess) and the Pioneer 115D, although any other suggestions would be more than welcome! It’s been a while since I’ve comprehensively read up on DVD writers so if any of you have a better feel for the current crop, your comments would be appreciated.
I’m going to be ripping a lot of old movies that probably are scratched up so good ripping performance is one of my top priorities. From what I’ve read, ripping varies a lot from drive to drive - one drive may perfectly read what another one might not. But still, which drives are more consistently good readers? Read speed is not important. I really only care about how well a drive will handle errors and scratches. Is the MediaTek chipset supposed to perform well in this regard?
As for scanning, I typically just use Nero 6.6.01 to “Verify” the disc after burning. Not sure if that actually is as good as the scanning program I’ve seen used on these forums, but I think I might start using that to scan my discs now.
I only will use the drive for burning SL DVDs - mainly movies and data archiving. Again, write speed is not as important as consistently quality burns and burned discs that are compatible with a variety of readers.
My other criterion is the ability to handle DVD-R. I just bought a 100 pack of Verbatim DVD-Rs so ideally, I’d like my drive to be compatible with them. I think I also have a 100 pack spindle of TY DVD-R lying around somewhere. I usually buy Verbatim or TY but if a drive can handle worse media, that’s a bonus. Either way, I’d like a drive that could burn DVD-R and DVD+R equally well.
I’ll recap:
I’m looking for an IDE DVD burner that
-can read/rip scratched discs, deal with errors
-is compatible with DVD-R
Thanks in advance for your help and advice!
PS: I’m not too good on the technical details of reading/writing so please excuse my confusion.