I have used a NEC 1100, then a NEC 1300, and now have the NEC 3500, and have found them all to offer excellent value for money and good reliability.
I paid only £41 at www.ebuyer.co.uk and have found the drive to burn to all formats (plus and minus, r and rw : once and re-writeable).
It burns some discs faster than what it says on the disc, for example some 8x discs will burn at 16x. However I have had some discs that are 8x that only burn at 4x speed. It depends on the media, not all are supported at the claimed speeds, but some do exceed the stated.
I was eager to try out the Dual Layer (DL) recording facility and had purchased some Datawrite DVD+R DL discs for just under £4 each, which is still expensive compared to the approx £0.25ea for DVD+R single layer discs but competitive at the time of writing. The disc was not recognised. I tried a Philips DVD+R DL and had no problems. The latest version of Ahead Nero Burning ROM 6.6.0.1 records to DL discs with no problem. After some searching, I found that the NEC is rebadged for TDK and I flashed my drive with this firmware (2.78), and then the Datawrite DL discs worked OK. Please note that this invalidates your warranty but until NEC release firmware that supports Ritek based discs, it was the only way around it for me.
The DL discs give excellent results, but the cost is high at the moment for blank media. As mentioned, Nero was used to burn the discs, it recognises the double capacity and burns the first then second layer on its own. Nothing difficult here, same as burning an ordinary single layer disc. Both the Datawrite and Philips DVD+R DL discs played okay in my PC and standalone players (MiCO Sofia, MiCO espejo R311i and Lodos X3).
If a disc is not recognised it is most likely to be a firmware issue. Check www.necd.de for compatibility lists of blank media, and latest firmware. If you know what you are doing and want to risk the warranty, visit http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.php?download_id=1897 to get the TDK version to use Ritek/Datawrite DL discs, or for the NEC official firmware (V2.18 is latest at time of writing) visit http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.php?download_id=1904
Blank CD-R's are burned at Ultra Speed, which superceeds the previous HighSpeed drives for re-writeables. I bought some cheap Tevion CD-R's from Aldi and they burned at 48x without any problems. On both DVD and CD recording the buffer-underrun kicks in and stops you wasting discs. However, I have always avoided running other tasks when burning blank media so have never had to rely on this facility much.
The drive supports CD-Text, and all the usual CD formats - extended/multi session etc. It also reads and writes to DVD+R , DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW. Using Nero it erases DVD+RW in less than 10 seconds, and burns at 8x a full DVD in about 6 minutes.
Installation is straight forward - connect to a spare IDE channel and reboot. It is recommended that the drive, if your set up allows, is set as master on its own channel.
Official firmware updates can be run from within Windows and require nothing more than a mouse click to run the program, and a confirmation "OK" dialogue box.
I have friends who have the Pioneer 1.06 which is similar spec, but the Pioneer wastes lots of discs through incompatibility. I found the NEC would record to any media, other than the Ritek DL - which is not on the NEC list anyway, but can be resolved as previously mentioned by firmware upgrade. At least, unlike the Pioneer it rejected the disc outright and didn't start the job then spit it out and waste the disc.
Its cheaper than most other writers, burns any disc from the market leaders (plus and minus R) (does anyone really use the incompatible with anything DVD-RAM???), and its FAST! Buy it.... 10/10
More details
Memory / capacity
Excellent
Design
Excellent
Ease of use
Very easy
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Good
Speed
Very fast
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