Drives > CD-RW Drives > IDE > from 9x to 16x

Advantages: Good value, seems solid, quick enough, 2MB Buffer
Disadvantages: The Black & Gold finish looks odd on a beige tower!

...Update: in response to kfingleton's comment. I've only made 1 coaster. I'm running the philips drive (it's a 4x4x32 drive) on a k6-3 400 machine with a udma 33 HDD, 64 MB RAM, and a 40x cd reader. I only ever burn at 4x, and it's proving very successful. ... Read review

Advantages: It worked for a while; Recognised name on the cover
Disadvantages: Everything - slow, unreliable, doesn't work!

I have a 4416e. It is slow, and has always been problematical. I have had it for under 2 years and have only written about 50 CDs on it and now it no longer works. Despite numerous attempts at getting in touch with Yamaha, I have not received a response. The writer always had poor performance when writing data CDs, often leaving missing data and unusable files. For music CDs it was excellent, though. It gave excellent reproduction and no loss of ...
...but it just ruined the disc every time. I can’t count the number of discs that it has ruined, actually. It often goes through the full write process and puts no information on the disc at all – just enough to ruin the disc. I have tried different makes and qualities of discs, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I have downloaded new drivers and upgrades to the software and have even tried a different type of re-writing ... Read review

Advantages: Reliable, good software
Disadvantages: BS customer service, not all advertised material included

...better. I had to ring Yamaha for the manual, when it came it was 12 A4 sheets bound with a piece of plastic and no apology at all. There are two lessons here: one buy the best, it really is worth it. Secondly, never buy from TECH DIRECT. the service is rubbish, and i will never deal with them again. I am sorry if i sound harsh, but that is my opinion, and this is what ciao.com is all about. Thanks ... Read review

Advantages: Very, very cheap; SATA; Fast; Reads/Writes most DVD formats
Disadvantages: Only comes in beige; No DVD-RAM writing (Read Only)

...REVIEW I bought my Pioneer DVR-212D, a few days ago for just £11 inc. VAT, BRAND NEW, from eBuyer.com. I hope you agree that's an incredible price for a S-ATA DVD rewriter. I only really needed the Pioneer drive to aid in testing the functionality of another more current P-ATA DVD-RW drive that was exhibiting some very odd behaviour that I wasn't absolutely certain was the drive's fault, so I wasn't too fussy about it being highly specified. Having ...
...the drive vertically. Being Pioneer I imagine longevity is a given, at least here in my household they have an enviable reputation for reliability. I have never managed to break anything I have bought from them in the past. It doesn't seem to matter what quality of disc you present it with either, it just accepts any old tat. Even the really nasty 8x reject DVDs my local computer emporium tries to pass of as quality gear work in this drive, a welcome ... Read review

Advantages: ummmmm
Disadvantages: Doesn't work very well, slow, intermitently recognises disks, poor back up service, need I go on?

I ordered my Freecom DVD Recorder LS USB 2.0 after my CD/DVD drive packed up on my 15 month old HP Desktop. I wanted it mainly to load CD ROM and burn DVD's from movies already converted to DVD format on my hard drive. Being that my PC had no disk drive I relied upon this external drive to load the bundled DVD burning software (Roxio 9). This took several days and many attempts. Then I tried burning my first DVD. After taking 3 hours to do a task ... Read review