Drives > Toshiba Drives

Advantages: Small, looks very cool
Disadvantages: Noe really, does what it says it does

Toshiba External USB 2.0 Combo Drive INTRO Along with my recent office purchase of the R200 laptop and seeing as it was minus a CDROM I bought an external CD unit. I originally made the mistake of buying the DVD ROM version and at £85 that was next to useless. So I returned that and got the Toshiba External USB2 Combo Drive. There are a few different ones out there, this one wrote CD's and read DVD's. IMPRESSIONS When you open the box up your ...
...ELSE As with all Toshiba products you get excellent product support. There is a good support section at www.toshiba.co.uk I quite like this unit. Looks good and functions well without being no the heavy side. Especially like the easy USB connection and short time it takes to set it up for use. It's a little bi costly but when you see what you get to go with your laptop it makes it worth while. ... Read review

Advantages: cheap, reliable
Disadvantages: DVD- only

First thing to note is that whilst this drive will read both DVD-R and DVD+R it will only record to DVD-R or DVD-RW. However, I don;t find this a problem. If you want to have multi-format capability then you will pay a lot more. If all you want is a decent cheap DVD writer then this will suit. Easy to install. Just stick in the spare drive slot and plug in IDE and power cables. Windows XP finds and configures no problem. My version came with Nero ...
...DVDs great. Super performance. Can write to DVD-Rs at 4x. However, can be a bit picky on media. I found it likes the decent media like Ritek but is not so keen on Bulkpaq or cheaper disks. One great thing though is that it NEVER seems to make coasters. If it doesnt like the media it just burns at 1x speed rather than try to burn faster and failing. This is great news for those of us who hate wasting blanks !!! All in all great DVD writer ideal ... Read review

Advantages: Very reliable
Disadvantages: None

One of the best CD Player makers in the business. I have never had any problems with this make of CD Player since I have been using them. Have fitted this make of CD Player in nearly every machine I have built for my self and for my customers for around the last six years and don’t think I have had one returned to me that is not working. Have tried all the other makes of CD Players and have had problems in one way or another with them except the ... 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