Drives > Combo Drives > 49x and faster > 6x

Advantages: See the above report!
Disadvantages: See the above report!

The Trimaxx 200 is one of the first generation of combination rewriters and DVD drives. It is also available rebadged as the Ricoh MP9060a, but is still essentially the same product. A combination drive can now be had for virtually the same price as a separate CD writer and DVD drive, and has the advantage of freeing up a drive bay and an IDE channel. You can copy CDs (copyright permitting, naturally...), make safe back-ups of your data, and also ...
...is nice. The Trimaxx is not difficult to install. As the 24x speed for CD reading is relatively slow I'd recommend you install the combo as a secondary drive; if your existing CD-ROM is faster than 24x keep it as the master and simply set the Trimaxx jumpers to slave. This also means you have two CD drives for making back ups, of course! Pop the drive into a free bay, attach the IDE and power cables, and re-assemble your PC. Scratch head and wonder ... Read review

Advantages: 4 in one drive
Disadvantages: price, speed

I bought my ricoh on advice from a friend and have from it good advice. The recorder is one of the new range of so called 4 in one drives, a cd player writer re-writer and dvd player. The ricoh is not the fastest recorder currently on the market but fast enough for my needs with writing at 6 speed and re-writing at 4 speed. The ricoh can overburn cd's a practice i find very useful in getting that extra few megabytes. It comes packaged with nero ... Read review

Advantages: Portable, easy to connect, usually runs without mains adapter.
Disadvantages: Only Lightscribe forces the use of the mains adapter.

...it also found me the LiteOn Slim 8-speed Lightscribe* USB drive, which unlike its desktop counterpart, uses the slim-line drive for a laptop and sticks it in a box the size of a slim paperback. It can also run with the 5 volts supplied by the USB port, and so only needs one connecting cable and no bloody mains adapter under normal conditions, thus making it suitable for putting into one of those side pockets of a laptop's carrying case. (*Luke Skywalker's ...
...to buying LiteOn DVD drives is the fact that some nerd has written a little utility for them called LTNRPC.exe. "Whoopee-doo!" I hear you cry. Well, you may or may not know that Windows only allows for 5 switches of DVD movie region before it locks to the last one. This means that anyone with a 'transatlantic' DVD collection of Regions 1 and 2 had better not use their PC to watch movies otherwise, as my Mum used to say, 'you'll get stuck like that!" ... Read review

Advantages: Multi-format Blu-ray and DVD/CD writer in one, HD Video Recording
Disadvantages: Havent any additional IDE or SATA Interface

...16x/CD-ROM 40X The Drive LaCie d2 is a Blu-ray/DVD/CD records, rewrites and reads 25 gigabytes GB or 50GB BD-R (recordable) and BD-RE (rewritable), as well as DVD±RW DL and CD±RW. The Drive comes fully equipped with Roxio burning software and dual FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 interfaces. Why FireWire? FireWire 400, also known as IEEE 1394, is a high-speed serial input /output technology for connecting peripheral devices to a computer or to each other. ...
...and graphics. it is Hot-pluggable, daisy-chainable and flexible up to 63 devices can be connected on a single bus. Blu-ray 50GB discs used in the BD Drive offer 10x more capacity than a single layer DVD. This increased capacity gives professionals the freedom to choose much higher bit rate codecs when mastering content, ultimately improving picture quality. For increased audio quality, Blu-ray technology allows for up to eight channels of 92kHz/32 ... Read review

Advantages: fast and reliable
Disadvantages: dont detect cd burn in another dvd or cd drives.

sony dvd has serious problems the cds which we burn in any other dvd drives like LG dont work in sony dvd drives it dont detect at all it detects only cd discs what we burn in sony dvd drives only sony has to rectify this problem as soon as possible other wise they loose lot of thier customers and most of the cds which we write in another dvd drives dont work at all in sony dvd drive a part of this problem rest of the things are perfect these dvd ... Read review