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Data Storage

DVD Burner Round-up 389

Posted by CmdrTaco from the making-movies-on-location dept.
Julio writes "Gone are the days of storage floppies and zip drives... CD-RW drives do an excellent job in making cheap backups and just about every new computer is equipped with one. As computers and software evolve, so will media. DVD burner drives are already optional equipment on many computers, and will probably become a standard within the next year. Are you ready for a DVD burner? TechSpot has posted a round-up of flagship DVD recorders from Plextor, Panasonic and Pioneer."
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DVD Burner Round-up More

DVD Burner Round-up

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  • Not Buying One Yet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:29PM (#6462913) Homepage Journal
    -- not until all the standards crap settles down and I know what I get wont be useless 2 months later.

    I don't even waste a lot of timing reading up on them. Just waiting on the market to decide what will be dominant.

    .

    • Re:Not Buying One Yet (Score:5, Funny)

      by Shenkerian ( 577120 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:36PM (#6463007)
      Wow is your nick appropriate.

      Buy a +/-R[W] and you're good to go.

    • Re:Not Buying One Yet (Score:5, Informative)

      by VivianC ( 206472 ) <internet_update@ ... o.com minus city> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:36PM (#6463012) Homepage Journal
      -- not until all the standards crap settles down and I know what I get wont be useless 2 months later.

      That is why I picked up the Sony DRU500XUL [sonyburners.com] which reads and burns DVD +/- R-RW. No matter what the standard settles on, I can already do it.

      This is the /. week to like Sony, right?
    • Same Here.

      Pretty much waiting for three things to happen.

      1) A Standard emerges that most if not all DVD Writers Adopt.
      2) Price Drops Below $100 to get more mainstream.
      3) Write speed gets faster. Particually the Write Speed of CD-R's.

      By the time that happens, most likely BluRay would be out for some insane price, But at least it looks like it will have a more defined standard and be 27 GB per disk.
      • Blu-Ray Schlu-Ray.

        I've been hearing about how blue laser drives are about to come out and supercede red laser drives for 8 years now.

        I'll believe it when I see it mass marketed (which is probably in about two more years, if the usual 10 years to production timeline holds true).

      • Re:Not Buying One Yet (Score:4, Interesting)

        by bryanp ( 160522 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @04:44PM (#6465127)
        1) A Standard emerges that most if not all DVD Writers Adopt.

        So get one of the multi-format drives from Sony (the DRU50x series) , Pioneer (the new A06 just released) or LiteOn (haven't seen it but I've heard it's just a rebadged Sony). I have a Sony and it works great.

        2) Price Drops Below $100 to get more mainstream.

        They're not there yet, but the prices are dropping like a rock. I paid $350 for a Sony DRU500AX just a few months ago (compared to $500 for my first CD burner lo these *mumble* years ago). You can now buy a Pioneer A06 for $209 at Newegg. Also, per MB DVD media is rather cheaper than CD.

        3) Write speed gets faster. Particually the Write Speed of CD-R's.

        The Sony will burn CD's at 24X. I know it's not 52X but come on, how fast does it really need to be? For me it was a step up anyway as I was upgrading from a Plextor 12X burner, but 24X is pretty speedy.

        I've heard people gripe at how long it takes to burn DVD's as well. It takes me 30 minutes to burn a DVD-R at 2X, and when generic 4X media is cheap enough it'll only be 15 minutes. Considering how much data is being burned that's pretty darned fast.

    • I would go so far as to say that writable DVDs have already missed their prime window of opportunity. The technology has grown somewhat obsolete without ever consolidating. Now higher capacity discs are already coming out.
    • Another great alternative to a DVD burner is a firewire hard drive. Last I checked, a person can get a fairly decent 160GB firewire or USB2.0 hard drive for the same amount as a DVD burner. It reads and writes quite a bit faster, too. Not quite as portable as a DVD, but it's great at LAN parties.

    • not until all the standards crap settles down and I know what I get wont be useless 2 months later.

      Do you have a DVD drive now? Do you have a PC with a DVD-ROM drive? If so, what format will they read? There's your standard. Who gives a Gary's ass if person X or corporation Y says -R is the way to go if the equipment you already possess is incompatible? And if the equipment you already have will read -R or +R or both, why do you care what "the standard" is?

      Just use what works ... for you.

      • Re:Not Buying One Yet (Score:5, Insightful)

        by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:27PM (#6463588) Homepage Journal
        I don't have a lot of money.

        I don't want to buy a drive that burns cds that wont play in anything but the one player I own- that if it breaks, can't be replaced.

        And I want to be able to make DVDs and give them to people.

        Lots of reason.

        A lot of people are giving me grief and I've been modded down as over rated but I tell you this makes sense to me and is not uncommon. While all this stuff is floating about I'll hold off.

        But more importantly - "Everybody to the limit"

        .
  • The real reason zips are going away is the key-chain size USB storage device. Why carry around a 100meg disc and have to have a drive installed on both ends (or have to carry the drive itself around) when you can simply stick this pen-sized piece of plastic into the back of a USB port (one of the reasons new models have additional USB ports up front), and boom!, instant 32-256 meg filesystems.

    The only significant delay was Windows 98 first edition and Win95, neither of which supported filesystems on USB devices. 98SE and beyond did, so once the majority of windows boxes moved on to 2K and XP, there was nothing stopping them.
    • Even better than the pen-sized piece of plastic is this sweet watch [thinkgeek.com]

      Yeah- zip drives are pretty pointless as far as I can tell.

    • I don't know about you, but I have encountered thousands more CDRs than I have ever seen USB keychain drives in use, *especially* considering that win9x can't support them very well.

      CDBurners were very much the end for ZIP drives. By the time they became mainstream most computers around had a CDrom drive, the same cannot be said for USB filesystem support

      • Mmm, yes, but for CD-RWs to become succesful floppy replacements we'd need several more things, like cd-rewriters on every computer. I don't know about other colleges, butI don't think they're going to give each PC at mine a cd-rewriter just so we can throw around files. Even besides that, CD-RWs are useful things, though they take ages to format once you get one chocked on stuff. Also, you're unable to edit files on CD, you'd have to copy them back to the HD, edit them, save them, burn them, repeat. This c

      • The school I work at is in the process of dumping all of our zip drives on hundreds of lab and office computers, and moving exclusively to solid-state USB storage for students & staff moving files around (and floppies I suppose, if all else fails).

        They'll never buy any more machines with ZIP drives in them. Too many problems with students getting disks stuck in the drive when labels peel off, corrupted filesystems & lost files, and of course, the IDE ZIP drives we have are SLOW.

        I'm looking forwar
      • CDBurners were very much the end for ZIP drives.

        After CDBurners became common, Zip drives were still often used by people who needed to carry around large files (from MS Office or Adobe programs) and edit them on multiple computers. Offices that had poor ethernet connectivity were the last bastion of the Zip disk. But today, USB keychains are conquering that territory.

        It does seem that CD-RW drives could've invaded that space, if using software that convincingly emulated a normal read-write filesystem

    • Re:CDBurners not the end for high-capacity Zip dri (Score:4, Informative)

      by leshert ( 40509 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:39PM (#6463045) Homepage
      Not only that, but the prices are coming down quickly, and the capacities are increasing almost as fast--you can get 2GB keychains now.

      USB keychain drives are in that silly pricing phase right now where you can pay more for a 32MB model than a 128MB model if you're not careful (the local Walmart had a 128MB model last week for $40.00). High-capacity IDE hard drives went through the same thing.

      I think keychain USB drives are going to be a real sleeper hit.
    • Actually, I think Zip disks (and superDisks etc) are going away/gone already because they were too much of a middle step. They were bigger than floppies, but smaller than CDs, and yet the price of 100MB disks never dropped below about $10US each. This meant that they were not disposable the way $0.50 floppies are, and yet don't have the capacity of a CD.

      • You're right on... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by artemis67 ( 93453 )
        The biggest users of Zip disks has to be the print/publishing business. Ad agencies, book publishers, print shops, et al, all have stacks and stacks and STACKS of Zip disks lying around.

        The first biggest problem was the price. The per disk cost is still up around $10. I worked at a book publisher and then an ad agency, and I can't tell you how many Zip disks we sent out that were unreturned, in spite of the fact that everyone we send them to knows about the high media cost.

        Second, Iomega took too freakin
  • And the winner is ..... the Plextor

    I know, i know, everyone is shocked and amazed.

  • Backing up via DVD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lysol ( 11150 ) * on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:31PM (#6462938)
    It's interesting to have that much backup space avail for a non-server computer. I got a Powerbook last December with the Super-drive and the only thing I can find to use it for is mostly cd-r. Dvd-r is nice to have, but I don't have much use for it. Maybe someone who d/l's movies or something can do it, but...

    Otoh, for making movies and stuff, this is very useful via the whole iMovie (or PC equiv) thing. But where this would really come in handy is on a server of some sort where you have big amounts of data. But even then, you need to back up more than 4 or 5 gigs worth usually, so..

    But for the end user, I guess it's nicer to have more than less. Who knows, I might start needing to back up more than 665MB soon..
    • I used to think that DVD-Rs were a good backup medium, and granted, they're better than CDs, but when you get into, or over 600GB of storage, backups are a pain, no matter what format you use. There's just nothing else out there that even comes close to being cheap and easy for backing up that much data (yet).

      The best alternative at this point, at least for me, is more HDs, probably removeable firewire drives that I can back-up on, then stash somewhere safe.

    • You must not have... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gosand ( 234100 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:10PM (#6463410)
      You must not have any pr0n or MP3s. :-)


      Seriously, my MP3 collection is about 15 GB, and that is just the stuff I have taken the time to rip. My CD collection would easily be 10 times that, if I ever get around to digitizing them.


      Granted, putting 15 GB on DVDs would be time consuming, but compared to CDRs, it is phenominal. I am kind of holding out for the blue lasers though.


      What could you use a DVD+-R for? How about imaging your system for instant restores? Hard to do with CDRs. Disk drives are getting bigger, and we are finding ways to fill them.

    • Re:Backing up via DVD (Score:3, Informative)

      by pmz ( 462998 )
      Dvd-r is nice to have, but I don't have much use for it.

      One application I've noticed is that it could be handy to rip a bunch of CDs to a hard disk, compress each image with bzip2 or gzip, and, then, rip a buttload of compressed CD images onto DVD. On the DVD, they are useless, but copying and decompressing them back onto the hard disk allows mounting via a loopback filesystem.

      I really like loopback filesystems. They allow accessing a CD-ROM at 10,000RPM Ultra320 SCSI niceness :)

      Oh, and other systems
    • I multi-track record at home, and can easily fill up 6GB of (uncompressed) space with one song. DVD-R/+R etc... is great for backup up the tracks for later use, where CD-R/RW just didn't cut it (unless I compressed the files before storing them).

  • consumer habits (Score:3, Insightful)

    by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:31PM (#6462941) Journal
    I'm already favoring the Plextor above all others without even reading the article or doing my own comparisons.

    The reason for this?

    My Plextor CD/RW.

    The lesson is this: If you build quality and get people to trust your brand name (based on prior experience), then the 2nd sale is *much* easier.

  • Waiting... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by r84x ( 650348 ) <r84x&yahoo,com> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:32PM (#6462946) Homepage Journal
    Just as I did with CD burners and the PS2, I will buckle down and wait for this technology to mature and come down in price.

    A while back I needed a large capacity backup device, and I had to choose between CD burners, Zip drives, Jaz drives, and those old optical disks. At the time, because of hardware and media cost, it would have been a tough decision, but by waiting, CD burners came to the forefront and were the most economical choice.

    Where does this tie in to DVD burners? Well, they are a bit expensive (although coming down) and I want to wait to see if a better technology is just over the horizon.

    There you go, my two cents, more or less.

  • Not complete (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They don't cover Pioneer's newly released DVR-A06 (multi-format) or any of Sony's nice burners.

  • Where is SONY? (Score:3, Informative)

    by ncl2fth ( 157991 ) <ncl2fth@gmaGIRAFFEil.com minus herbivore> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:33PM (#6462961)
    That's all thats gets me.. The best DVD burner out there is the Sony DVD+-RW 4x..

  • I could settle this would standards mess with $200 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Prince_Ali ( 614163 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:33PM (#6462968) Journal
    I could settle this would standards mess with $200. As soon as I buy a -R drive +R would become the standard, and if I bought a +R drive -R would become the standard. My refusal to buy a DVD writer is the only thing keeping the industry from standardizing.
    • Please don't buy a combo drive! Then someone would come out with a new format that would become the standard and we would all be screwed.

    • Re:I could settle this would standards mess with $ (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:53PM (#6463213)
      " As soon as I buy a -R drive +R would become the standard, and if I bought a +R drive -R would become the standard."

      Great, he bought a combo drive. We all need to switch to DVD-RAM now.

    • Re:I could settle this would standards mess with $ (Score:5, Funny)

      by pmz ( 462998 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:44PM (#6463761) Homepage
      As soon as I buy a -R drive +R would become the standard, and if I bought a +R drive -R would become the standard.

      Just buy one of those 10 or 15-bay external drive towers. Then, you'd have room for each DVD standard as it emerges while keeping all the old DVD drives around for legacy support. You should also get a PCI expansion enclosure, so you can be sure to have enough SCSI controllers to handle all the external drive towers you will eventually get.

      With six PCI slots plus a built-in host adapter, you could, in theory, support 7x15=105--yes, that's 105--DVD standards before needing more PCI slots and SCSI controllers.

      I'd say you would need only $15,000 to guarantee 100% compatibility with all the DVD discs you might come across. At such an affordable price point, why are you hesitating?!?
  • There's more than 3 manufacturers, people. But even with that, was it a shock at all that Plextor won? I mean, come on, it's Plextor for Christ's sake.
  • ... using DVDs as coasters for the beer cans!
  • I keep almost buying a DVD burner but I just can't bring myself to do so. With a CD burner it was a large step up in storage space compared to the standard floppy, and was easily read anywhere as almost everyone had a CD-ROM (as apposed to other solutions such as zip, jazz, etc).

    DVD burners on the other hand don't quite seem to offer enough for me to justify buying one. My files are hardly over 700 megs, the media is still quite expensive, it's useless already for hard drive backups and I can't back up my
    • For the price of a DVD burner I can buy 1,400 blank CD-R (14p x 1,400 = 200 quid UK). I can use 1 a day for 4 years and after 3 months I've backed up 45 Gbytes at an average 500Mbyte per CD-R. Sure files that won't fit are a pain but "split" and "cat" are my friends. Disclaimer - My arithmetic will self-destruct when I hit submit.

  • b b b blue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by krray ( 605395 ) * on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:35PM (#6462990)
    I'm not sure how to say this without sounding like some Mac freak (which I am now :), but I've been doing DVD burning for years now.

    You've seen the chart (read the story), right? Yeah -- slow as heck it seems sometimes. The first time I really started using the burner it was on the Mac. Slow enough that I also got a Firewire card for one of the office PC's and confirmed it was, well, SLOW. 99% of my data is sitting on RAID-1 or 5 subsystems and backed up daily (thankfully :). The network and firewire is just faster. Plain and simple.

    For corporate backups the data flows from hard drive to hard drive. Sits on RAID-5 servers going to a portable drive where it is dumped onto RAID-1 subsystems in multiple locations.

    DVD is good for archiving movies/home videos in native format (so any DVD player can view them). Decent quality will give you 2 hours per DVD. Many more if you do something like I do and put them in MP4 format (~3 movies per DVD then).

    A roaming laptop is great for a quick plug in to watch a archived movie as such. Otherwise any DVD player is good. The problem is it's only 4.7G worth which can easily be eaten up when users have 60-80G hard drives.

    1-2G hard drives were the norm once CD-RW became the "norm" and you could do a lot of damage with 600 or 700M CD's. DVD's are barely usable (today) for backup needs and the speed still stinks for all flavors (+/-RW or RAM).

    BLUE LASER with +20G is worth waiting a bit longer for, IMHO. That's large enough to be useful for movies (easily) and backing up data in chunks as needed. SPEED will be key or else it'll take too damn long. 4x at a minimum to start.

    With blue laser coming along, what, next year (somewhat mainstream realistically)? I'm thinking the industry waited too long and bickered among themselves for too long (+, - or RAM) that the listed technology will be surpassed and old hat. It is for me at least...

    • Re:b b b blue (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hawkstone ( 233083 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:01PM (#6463308)
      Here's the problem: blue laser will be expensive when it first comes out. How many years have we waited for DVD burners to get to the $200 range? They started way up around $1000, and only last year or thereabouts dropped to the sub $300 range.

      You're absolutely correct that DVDs are barely usable for backup, but the drives and media are finally reasonably priced. So I could wait one year and buy a $1000 blue laser recorder with media that won't play in a single set-top DVD player sold today (ignoring bakward compatibility with current DVD+/-R), and in the meantime I'm stuck with 30 CD's to back up my 20 gigs of important data.

      Or, I can buy my $175 DVD burner, get it all on 5 discs without having to split the data nearly as much, have the ability to back up my DVD movies at good quality, and let it tide me over until the blue lasers (or whatever) come down in price a few years from now.

      I just bought a DVD-RW a few weeks ago, and I love it. Just thought I'd present my justification as an opposing viewpoint.

  • DVD burners standard within the next year? That sounds a little too auspicious to me.
    The usefulness for backing up information is obvious, but is there any real software that allows you to make copies DVDs and maintain the quality? (I'm just asking out of curiosity... not for any illegal reasons)
    • DVD burners standard within the next year? That sounds a little too auspicious to me.
      The usefulness for backing up information is obvious, but is there any real software that allows you to make copies DVDs and maintain the quality? (I'm just asking out of curiosity... not for any illegal reasons)

      It isn't perfect, but DVDXCOPY [dvdxcopy.com] seems to work fine for my needs. My kids trash a DVD about every two weeks so it has saved me a fortune.

      Wha...? Damn! Now I have the Disney police knocking at my door!

  • Better than tape (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yroJJory ( 559141 ) <me@@@jory...org> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:36PM (#6463005) Homepage
    I gave up using tape for backups because it was too costly and time-consuming. For my audio engineering work, DVD-R is fantastic. I recently did a project that archived neatly onto 6 DVDs. That cost me a grand total of $20 for media and about the same amount of time to archive as did my Ecrix VXA1. However, the archives are infinitely more accessible, as I can open the disc on any machine with a DVD-ROM, regardless of having a VXA drive around. And, the files are instantly accessible, without having to restore from tape.

    DVD-RW is fantastic!
  • I stopped reading. Am I in the market to buy? Yes. Did you help me choose? Yes. You saved me the time and effort of reading your column.

    Yo Grark
    Canadian Bred with American Buttering.

  • New Technology (Score:3, Interesting)

    by joynt ( 686645 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:41PM (#6463073) Homepage
    With the new high capacity disks/readers coming out I don't see much of a point buying these now.
    Why get a dvd that holds a piddly 5gb when you can get 20gb capacity [cnn.com], hopefully these new discs/drives will come down in price soon.
  • Sony, TDK, and Iomega all have drives that can do DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM (in Iomega's case) at 4x or so. Why were none of these reviewed?

  • I don't mean to sound negative... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:45PM (#6463114)
    but this review was lame: first of all it's reviewing the Pioneer A05 when the A06 has been available for quite a while (bought one last week, actually) and secondly it does seem quite short on content.

    Things that should have been there if this was a decent review:

    - speed/performance tests with DVD-RW/DVD+RW media (both, for drives that support both like the A06)

    - compatibility tests with DVD+R/DVD-R media (aka burn in one burner, check that it's readable in the others)

    - speed tests with CDR/CDRW media

    - linux compatibility test (optional, but mentioning xcdroast/prodvd for burning data DVDs and the chain needed to encode video DVDs would've been nice)

    - more drives! (LG, LiteOn, Sony + various off-brand ones)

    etc. etc. etc.
  • Did anyone else glance at the title and think the MPAA is hunting down and destroying all DVD burners? If sharing an mp3 will soon get you 5 years in prison, they'd probably try to give you three or four simultaneous death sentences for copying a DVD... good thing I RTFA, I can sleep better now.

  • Some comments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:46PM (#6463129)
    1. "Roundup", hardly. Three drives does not a roundup make :(

    2. "Expensive". The difference in price from highest to lowest is $45, not too shabby and hardly worth the difference once you take in other considerations (like how many toasters cheap drive a produces). I have fond memories of creating shelves of cd toasters on our $3000 Ricoh 2x CDR when the cd blanks were $25 a piece on this one project. Ouch, thank god we weren't paying for those things, I bet we wen't through over $10K worth of blanks.

    3. No checking of valid DVD video. He mentions people wanting to backup their DVD's, but then never tests to make sure any DVD backups actually play in most dvd players. I know for me this is critically important and I would want to see the results of such a test.
  • Great, now instead of those nice 710MB Divx files, I'll be downloading 4.71GB 'Full Qualify' DIVX's off Kazaa.

    At least I will finally get that collection of 710MB Divx's off my to-burn partition.

  • RW pointless? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 )
    Is there even a point to making disc RW and burners that can do RW? From my experience with CDs, RW are slower to burn, more expensive, and not as compatible. With CDRs costing less than what floppies used to sell for, RW capabilities are pointless. Just pop a new disc in instead. I can see DVDs going the same route as it matures. So why bother wasting the money for RW.

    • Re:RW pointless? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by coryking ( 104614 )
      Not pointless at all. When it's so hard to actually burn a movie that will play in your DVD player, it pays to test it once on a RW then burn it as a final on a real disk.

  • Crazy pricing (Score:3, Informative)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:53PM (#6463212) Homepage
    In the UK a multiformat reader (a pioneer 106) is now the same price as a -R/RW only (a pioneer 105).

    Last month a 105 was £200+. Two weeks later the 106 was £200 and the 105 was £100. Now the 106 is £100. (Ish, £130 inc vat - under $200 US.) Media is down to 50p a disk for -R.

    For the people bitching about speed, the 106 is a 4x writer (except for DVD-R/RW) which is around 6 _megabits_/second - 4.5gb every 15 mins. You can burn off a 50gb backup in 2.5 hrs!

    But in the end, it matters little what you buy, as all new players will be able to read both. It's not like VHS vs Beta, where the things were different sizes, if consolidation happens it will be because of pressure on media prices (2x DVD-RW is cheaper to manufacture than 1x DVD-R and 1x DVD+R) and not because of anything else. After all, do you know anyone who uses CDRWs reguarly? Nope, me either, so the problems with not being able to exchange DVDRW disks will be minimal - and go away entirley as most people will get dual format drives anyway.
    • Umm, I use CD-RWs all the time. Not for data exchange, but for back ups. I'd rather burn over top of my previous backup than have to be constantly destroying used CD-R media.
  • Anyone out there know how much CPU overhead these DVD Burners use? I've seen CD Burners run underspeed on about a PIII 400 and will max out a PIII 600. Could I put two DVD Burners in a single box? If so, what kind of CPU do you think I'd need to do simultaneous burning?
    • Huh CPU overhead?

      It's an ATAPI device, it'll use no more overhead than your hard drive. If it's using any real CPU time, you want to make sure it's using DMA.

      Go to your control panel, system properties, devices, select your drive, properties, and check "Enable DMA"

      2k/XP - go to the IDE controller and set same for appropriate device.

      Of course, if you're encoding/decoding mp3/mpeg/mpeg2 on the fly, that'll use cpu time - but it has nothing to do with the drive.

      For you simultaneos burning, put each drive

  • Last generation drives, no Sony (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:56PM (#6463241) Homepage
    Ok, I admit, I didn't read the article. Why? Because I looked at the drives they're reviewing and knew it was pointless.

    First off, they're reviewing the previous generation of DVD burners. The new Pioneer A06 is a multi-format drive, capable of burning everything but DVD-RAM (which is a dead standard - it required usage of caddies and was incompatible with stand alone DVD players). The Plextor and Panasonic are so-so drives at best. They didn't review the Sony, which is considered the other "best" drive (Pioneer and Sony have been the only two major players until recently), which is also multi-format.

    There are a ton of new companies on the DVD burner front too -- LiteOn, NEC, Mitsumi, etc. which I suspect OEM either the Sony or Pioneer drives (no, I haven't looked into it enough to know for sure).

    If you want a real resource for DVD burner comparisons, don't even bother with Techspot. Their "review" is about 6 months out of date. Instead go to DVDR Help [dvdrhelp.com], which is pretty much the place for anything you could want to know about DVD players, burners, software, etc.

    Format wars are essentially over too... most new (and even most 2-3 year old) players can read any of the formats except DVD-RAM. The new burners can write any format you choose, and are at or under $200 now (pricing from NewEgg [newegg.com]). Buying a single format burner is just silly.

    Honestly though, unless you're burning home videos then you're probably still better off with a CD-RW drive. At under $50 it's hard to go wrong, and there's a lot more computers with CD drives than DVD drives. On the other hand, more games are starting to come out on DVD now (HL2 will be, as well as CD and via Steam), so you may want a DVD drive in your computer (although DVD-ROMs are only $30-40, so CD-RW + DVD-ROM is less than half the price and gives you 2 drives).

  • My Experiences (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gailin ( 138488 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @01:56PM (#6463249) Homepage
    I bought the Pioneer DVR-A05 [pioneerelectronics.com] dvd-r/rw burner. I must say that I love it! I, like a lot of people, have a home file server that I share all my files and music from. I had been making periodic backups onto other hard drives, but have found it be cumbersome and expensive. In an afternoon I was able to back up my server and all other important information onto dvd-r's and save a lot of money to boot.

    If you shop around for media, you can find blanks pretty cheap. I think the ones I'm using now cost 1.26 a piece, which is much cheaper than hard drives.

    As for movies, I bought my dvd player and burner around the same to time to ensure compatibility. I also have found that ALL of my friends home DVD players can play movies that I have recorded. And I think it would be fair to say, that most of the players have been purchased within the last two years. Of course, your experiences may vary, I have just had great luck with dvd-r/rw.

    G

  • Useless review (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErMaC ( 131019 ) <ermac@@@ermacstudios...org> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:02PM (#6463319) Homepage
    This set of reviews is absolutely useless. They don't do into covering the two most important things in any DVD-Burner: Player compatability and DVD-blank compatability.

    All +/-R crud aside (and most of the newer drives like the Sony DRU500 and Pioneer A06 do dual format anyway), the biggest issue for someone who's going to buy a DVD burner is whether the discs they burn will play in their set top player, and other people's. This article doesn't even consider that fact.

    Other posters will touch on this I'm sure - DVD's aren't the ideal backup solution. They're alright, but really what DVD is good for is storing video. I think the number of people buying DVD burners to use for backup is a whole lot smaller than the audience who actually want to make DVDs they can play on their television, or bring to their friend's house.

    Finally, all these drives are OLD news. The A05 has already been superceded by the A06 from Pioneer, the review doesn't mention a Sony drive at all, and Plextor has just announced their new 8x DVD+R/4x DVD-R burner that will come out sometime in the next month. Perhaps if this review was posted maybe 4 months ago it would be relevant.

    I could recommend a bunch of sites with relevant reviews, but I'd rather not get them slashdotted. Check the almighty google for reviews, hopefully ones which aren't practically devoid of useful information like this one.

  • Plextor will soon come with a new 8x drive! (Score:4, Informative)

    by pointwood ( 14018 ) <jramskov@ g m a i l . com> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:04PM (#6463346) Homepage

    If possible, I would wait until that hits the marked: Plextor PX-708A [cdrinfo.com]

  • "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CDs".


    A 747 has a cargo volume of 703 cubic meters. Assuming you can fit 384 50-disc spindles per cubic meter, that means the 747 can carry 13497600 CDs. Let's say they're recordable DVDs holding 4.7 GB of information apiece. That would be 63438720 GB of information, or a little over 63 petabytes (63,000 terabytes). Over a 20-hour flight, that translates into 881.093 GB/s of bandwidth. A lot of bandwidth indeed.

  • How long do DVDs last? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:07PM (#6463370) Homepage
    But how long does a burned DVD last? That is my question. I don't want to burn a disk with all my digital photos on it only to find out 5 years later that the dye (or whatever is on a DVD) fades and is no longer readable.

  • looked at a few (Score:3, Informative)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asv@nOspam.ivoss.com> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:15PM (#6463457) Homepage Journal
    I was looking to back up my SHN and FLAC (lossless audio) collection, with a DVD burner I could fit about 2 concerts of SHN files on one DVD. In the end, I decided to just buy a 200 GB hard drive. When considering the cost of DVD burner and DVD media to back up 200 GB, I saved around $200. Not to mention the time it would take burn 50 DVD's.

    I guess if your looking burn DVD video, then yes go buy a DVD burner, but if it is for storage, just buy another hard drive. You can pick up an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure for $25 if you're looking to take stuff on the road.

  • It will always take 11-12 pieces of media to back up my stuff. Currently that's 11-12 CDR's, it used to be 10-12 floppies, then 10-12 zip disks. So, I'm not due to upgrade to a DVD writer for a little bit.
  • It's all very well to rave about using a DVD burner as a backup device but AFAIK there still isn't a Windows server OS that supports DVD burning yet. I haven't looked at this for a couple of months but I was researching this on a couple of HP Servers we had that only had a gig or so of data to be backed up. Pricewise a DVD kills any of the proprietary tape solutions. Tape software is bloated and overly complicated to use and you can only restore files to a server that has the same type of SCSI drive install

  • Fragile Media (Score:5, Interesting)

    by poptones ( 653660 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @02:21PM (#6463530) Journal
    I still have a TDK CD here that was burned for me nearly a decade ago. It's a gold disc with the blue tint, it's covered with little scratches, but for the most part it's still usable (although the data - like a win95 install, office95, etc isn't).

    Since then I've owned three different burners myself and exchanged discs with many people, and the one consistent "feature" seems to be you never know exactly when (or why) a disc will just "go bad." I've had discs that worked one week suddenly refuse to respond the next week even when trying to pull the data off with something like isobuster. I've lost I don't know how many thousands of files like this (no, not just porn) and it's not just discs from my own drives; I can watch one of four discs of the scifi channel's "Dune" series because the other three, which I got from a friend, simply refuse to play. Why? I don't know; there's no shmutz on the disc, and I can't find a single hole.

    And that's the other thing: what happened to EFM and redundancy and storing nonconsecutive bits on the disc? A single tiny pinhole should NOT be making an entire file (or, if it's big enough, an entire disc) unreadable. The TDK I got a decade ago can still be read through many scratches. I can only assume it's because of the increased speed we all record at - which tells me that these DVDs - already an incredibly fragile format even in "store bought" form - are going to be even less reliable than CDR. No way in hell will I ever again trust my data to a CD "backup" alone - much less a DVD.

    So far as I can see all these are good for is making DVDs - and who cares about those old fashion things any more? Sure, it's alright for bringing home a box of bits from the store - but if you're going to trade with a friend it's just as easy to stick a hard drive in a box. And the data transfer is faster, and the media, ultimately, far more reliable.

    • Re:Fragile Media (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )
      you do know you can burn at slower speeds.

      If you have a good microscope, look at the CDRsurface. burning at Less than 12X produces clean dark spots while many low cost (lite-on) 600X burners produce nasty smudged dark spots in the ink.

      if it's important.... burn it slower and get GOOD media. the Silver dye discs I have here as well as the gold dye discs burned at 12X will even read in older CD drives that wont read any other CDR.

  • DVD+R(W) is better than DVD-R(W) (Score:4, Informative)

    by bluegreenone ( 526698 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @03:41PM (#6464418) Homepage
    or so i read. An article [cdfreaks.com] sheds some light on the whole format war (hint: the title is "Why DVD+R(W) is superior to DVD-R(W)"). From what I've read DVD+RW is the better format technically; as to why read the article.

    Some other helpful sites:
    Unofficial DVD+RW site [dvdplusrw.org]
    linux dvd+rw info and tools [chalmers.se]

    Some choice quotes from linux info page:

    The key feature of DVD+RW/+R media is high [spatial] frequency wobbled [pre-]groove with addressing information modulated into it. This makes it possible to resume interrupted [or deliberately suspended] burning process with accuracy high enough for DVD[-ROM] player not to "notice" anything at playback time. Recovery from buffer underrun condition in DVD-RW/-R case in turn is way less accurate procedure...

    As already mentioned, DVD+ groove has "addressing information modulated into it," ADIP (ADress In Pre-groove). This gives you an advantage of writing DVD+RW in truly arbitrary order, even to virgin surface and practically instantly (after ~40 seconds long initial format procedure). In addition, DVD+RW can be conveniently written to with 2KB granularity(***). DVD-RW in turn can only be overwritten in arbitrary order. Meaning that it either has to be completely formatted first (it takes an hour to format 1x media), or initially written to in a sequential manner...

  • 4G media to backup 300G?? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sacrilicious ( 316896 ) <qbgfynfu.opt@recursor.net> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @04:09PM (#6464729) Homepage
    The article starts off saying "With 300 gig drives hitting pavement...." DVD drives hold about 4G of data. It doesn't sound realistic to back up a large amount of data in chunks that are approx 1/100th the size of the media. It's in the same ballpark as saying you'll use floppy drives to back up a CD's worth of data. Sure, technically you can do it... but it's not realistic.

  • The test report is misleading (Score:3, Informative)

    by stock ( 129999 ) <stock@stokkie.net> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @07:23PM (#6466464) Homepage
    The Plextor is max 4x burning speed with DVD+R recordables.
    The Pioneer is max 4x burning speed with DVD-R recordables.
    The Panasonic is max 2x burning speed with DVD-R recordables.

    So the panasonic already lost even before the shootout was started. All of these drives do either only + or - burning but not both. So if i was looking for a new DVD burner today i would leave these drives inside the shop.

    I would opt for the NEC 1100A or the Pioneer DVR-A06 as they burn both + and - media. It seems however that Plextor also will bring a dual-burn (+ and - burn capabilities) drive shortly.

    So if your looking for a DVD burner which should last for some time, don't buy any drive from the report. If you want a cheap reliable drive and don't mind the burning format , take either the Pioneer DVR-A05 or the Plextor PX-504A.

    Robert

  • iDVD and DVD drives (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @08:10PM (#6466791)
    One thing for OSX users to keep in mind is that iDVD will only work with the Apple drives. However the Apple drives are actually Pioneer drives. So if you want to buy a DVD writer and use the rather nice iDVD you should get a Pioneer DVR-103 or DVR-104.

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