Its quite expensive and someone actually told me "why the heck do you need such a beastly machine?".

I dont need such a beastly machine.

So, would anyone please recommend me a cheaper main Optical Drive?
Good quality and price please.


TY in advance.

Love,
Ghalk

Umm... LiteOn offers some decent IDE DVD burners for +/- $30. Optical drives are pretty much commodities nowadays; the only real issue is the included software. I've got a Memorex Dual Layer burner that came with the Nero suite, for instance. Plextor is the only company to offer SATA DVD burners at this time.

If your not going for the plextor, then look at some of the offerings from LG.
I have used many of their dvd burners have never had a problem with them. They are good and have a nice price.

From my experience, I dislike nec burners because I kept getting problems with the 3 that I had, but when I tried burning the same files with the same discs and the LG burners didnt have a problem.

IMHO get an LG burner, they are great for the price.

tytytytyty

I do like Plextors myself.

If you are aiming to copy disks that you are not supposed to, then plextors have a track record of doing that best!

The Plextor Premium CD-RW drive was and is the only drive to ever be able to do a 1:1 copy of certain copy protection schemes.

Plextor drives generally burn with very little jitter etc.

I just bought my PX-760SA for £65, and it was faulty (couldnt burn DVD+RWs, burnt DVD±Rs fine). Phoned Plextor-Europe, they gave me an RMA number, DHL collected it the same day, delivered it to Belgium the day after, and a new drive was back with me in the UK the day after that.

Plextor spent £130 each way for a total of £260 on next-day-international shipping. That to me shows that they dont expect their drives to fail often! The new drive is working fine and I still have 2 years of warranty left.

And I love the fact that it is SATA, I'm currently working on switching alll my devices over to SATA

Is there a point in getting a SATA2 dvd burner? As far as I know, DVD and CD transfer rates are so slow that it shouldn't make a difference which interface is used. Maybe a difference in lead-in/out times?

The reason I wanted SATA was not for transfer times, I just wanted rid of all the PATA cables in my case for airflow.

Plus, as ICH8R has no PATA controller and nForce 590 only one, I get the feeling that my next big mobo upgrade will not have one either - PATA is dieing.

PATA is dying... but I think it will stick around for atleast 2-3 years just because hard drives for PATA are cheaper. As for the DVD burner... I dont think its wroth the extra money for a SATA burner - they are in general twice as expensive as PATA ones, and I think you would do better buying a PATA burner and waiting for Blu-ray prices to drop and then getting one of those drives for SATA.

There are other SATA burners that aren't made by Plextor (not that they make bad stuff). Samsung and LiteOn make SATA burners too, and for a good deal less than the Plextor. I picked up a Samsung myself for about £25.00 last month.

I agree Plextor are expensive relative to other drives, but they are unarguably the best, and @ £65 its hardly the most expensive component you are going to buy for your system.

No Plextor drives satisfies my extreme(read illegal) demands.
They're only good at what they're supposed to do for a very low performance/$.

Burn quality for any burners including Plextor takes around a month after release for the firmware to reach maturity.

So what is your current top pick then?

PS The NEC 35xx's seem to get the job of burning my files to CD and DVD done quite nicely. Works great with cheap Ritech 8X DVD+Rs.

Though the LightScribe drives are very tempting as they are just as cheap as the drives withouth this feature.

I bought a $315+ Liteon LDW-400 Dual DVD RW which was really a rebranded Sony drive. It had the typical and most unavoidable problems typical of the first generation of new technology, but I was really annoyed that Liteon quickly removed all references to its existance from its website. Only way to get firmware update was to email them.

Luckily other sites posted the firmware because some of the support staff never heard of the drive and would go so far as to deny its existance.

Have this plextor. It has one fault...it's a wee bit noisy. Much noisier then my Asus PS2, which I recommend to anyone

well im not trust plextor (708As the one I got) anymore its having probs scratches disks (its too sensitive) and also reading some TDK CDs, it just spun for burning with no progress bar move. So anyone know a good alternative,

still LG or newer plex to get? thx