Section 02 - How do I pick a good optical drive?
Brand
Brand matters! Sure its not the be-all-end-all but it certainly helps you narrow down the selection list. If you really do your background research before buying drives you'll often find that drives are rebagged by some manufacturers (i.e., Company A will buy a generic drive from Company B and slap a Company A logo on it). In general however, there are some brands with fairly consistent performance to look out for include:
- Plextor
- ASUS
- BenQ
- Lite-On
- NEC
- Pioneer
Some other brands lack the consistency of the previous list but can be good choices (often because they are rebagged models from the previous list) include:
Check for Performance
Just comparing the marketed numbers can be helpful in narrowing down choices. Granted, burning faster isnt always the best idea however, all things being equal, you'd rather have a drive that
can burn faster than one that cant. Some drives trade performance with one type of media for performance in another -- so you may want/need to decide which faction you will follow before making your purchase.
In general, DVD-R will be more widely compatible (an particularly so with home theater drives) however, DVD+R will provide for faster burns (rather, DVD+R media and burning is more forgiving at high-speed than for DVD-R). For the most part however, there isnt much of a difference to the casual end-user.
Manufacturer Support
Some manufacturers are known to suppor their drives with new firmware releases more so than others; these firmware releases add to the functionality of the drive by either allowing the drive to burn faster, burn to a wider variety of media or burn with more confidence (quality of burn, i.e., fewer C1/C2/P0/P1 errors). Some
Features and Extra Features
If you're in the market for a new optical drive, the following should, for all intents and purposes, support DVD±R, DVD±RW and DVD±R DL formats. Features like LightScribe should be considered if there isnt a large premium for it (even if you dont forsee yourself using the technology anytime soon). The reasoning is that, in time, LighScribe media will come down in price and then the technology may be more appealing.
If you're looking for a fully featured drive (and are willing to pay the substantial premium), Plextor drives are the cream of the crop. Innovations included with a substantial number of their drives include:
- PowerRec This is actually an acronym for Plextor Optimized Writing Error Reduction Control which is a bunch of mumbo jumbo for a fancy bit of circuitry which manages the power output of the burning laser (and also affects the burn speed) and what it does is constantly monitors the burning process and if errors are encountered, it slows the down the burn process to minimize them. This is particularly useful when overspeeding a disc (i.e., burning a 4X rated DVDR at say, 8X)
- GigaREC This is a very nifty technology whereby, the drive tosses out the CD-R Orange Book spec in order to crap 900MB or so onto a standard 700MB disc. The only catch is that compatability of that disc is limited to essentially Plextor drives with this technology
- SecuRec Which essentially encrypts CDR media ... kinda neat but again, compatability issues.
- SilentMode Plextor drives have a hardware capacity to throttle their speed to essentially eliminate any operational noise -- very useful for those wanting to build silent boxes.
Other makes (like LiteOn and IIRC, ASUS) have similar features under different names.