NEC MultiSpin ND-1300A

...I decided to buy the NEC 1300A based on a fine op by BNibbles and a host of ones on Ciao Germany – yep using the system for what it is really there for! Silbermond1981 and Docdoom both wrote diamond-rated ops over there which were useful in convincing me to part with my money. I purchased the OEM version (i.e. no cables, no burning software, no blanks included) from the Vienna branch of Peluga (www.peluga.at is their site for telling you how to get ...
...blanks to see whether the NEC plays ball or whether the firmware fix mentioned in other reviews will be necessary. Given the fact that the DVD burner is primarily used for business purposes, I don't actively intend to muck about with it for warranty reasons, so will stick to the more expensive blanks for that reason alone - I think my customers would prefer me to spend an extra couple of Euro if I am delivering work which I am charging them hundreds ... more

My recent work commitments have had a couple of interesting effects on my computer - 1) I have finally shelled out for TRADOS (a Translation Memory software package) and 2) I have bought a DVD burner - to cope with the increased volume of data that is currently being processed for jobs. I used to imagine that a 700Mb blank CD took quite a lot of filling, but with the reams of product catalogues, handbooks and the like that I have been processing in recent months, the stack of CDs that was building up in my collection was starting to take up alarming amounts of space - just as 100Mb ZIP disks had done before CD burners came around.

I must admit that I decided to buy the NEC 1300A based on a fine op by BNibbles and a host of ones on Ciao Germany – yep using the system for what it is really there for! Silbermond1981 and Docdoom both wrote diamond-rated ops over there which were useful in convincing me to part with my money. I purchased the OEM version (i.e. no cables, no burning software, no blanks included) from the Vienna branch of Peluga (www.peluga.at is their site for telling you how to get there) after researching prices on the ever-reliable www.geizhals.at. The net result: a ten minute walk in Vienna’s early February sunshine, EUR 86 in cash on the desk and a walk home with new DVD Burner. One of the reasons for the burner was to do a backup of my data before installing Windows XP Pro (another EUR 136 in cash on the same shopping trip). One of the main factors was that the model supported both DVD+R(W) and DVD-R(W) writing (see below for the ins and outs about this!), as whilst the DVD+R vs DVD-R war seems doesn’t seem to be over – www.dvdrhelp.com reports that 92% of DVD-ROM drives will read DVD-R but only 87% will read DVD+R – I’ll be prone to be a fence-sitter!

4.7 = 4.38

This seemingly nonsensical statement is true not just for the 1300A but also for other recorders. The 4.7Gb blank you buy (regardless of whether -R or +R!) is in fact a 4.38Gb blank. As both technologies use a standard known as DVD-5 – a single layer standard for DVDs which stores up to 4.7Gb – this is bases on a “metrical Gigabyte” where 1GB=1000Mb. Of course the reality is that 1GB is 1024Mb and 1Mb is 1024Kb and 1Kb is 1024 bytes) so 4,700,000,000 bytes of information is only 4.38Gb.

INSTALLATION

This drive is, as with all the thousands of CD Rom, CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives I have ever fitted, packaged to fit in a single 5.25” bay on a desktop computer – if you don’t have a spare one, then the chances are that if you replace your CD-Rom drive with this one, then you’ll not have any problems. You could of course even replace your CD burner with this drive – it does after-all also burn CDs, although only at 16 speed – for CD-Rs and 10 speed for CD-RW – although if you are like me you’ll not be burning CDs that often any more so that isn’t really a problem.

The drive is best fitted on the secondary IDE port as the master device – your hard drive usually sits on the primary IDE port - in my case both my hard drives sit on the primary IDE connection and my DVD and CD burners sit on the secondary IDE. You'll need to connect the drive to the soundcard - using a four pin connector - chances are that this is connected to your existing CD Rom drive and/or CD burner. The jumper cap needs to be set to Master (how to do this is shown on the metal case) and otherwise just use the 40 pin ribbon connector to connect it via IDE.

All the drivers are supplied as firmware – there are firmware flashes available – which are useful in turning the drive into a region free version – otherwise you can only reset the drive region 5 times before it is permanently set to the region that it was changed to last (if you buy a new computer with the drive installed as part of the system you will often find that they have been kind enough to do this for you!).

As the version I bought came without any burning software and without any DVD viewing software, I obviously also had to install that – fortunately I had a WinDVD distribution CD and a CD version of Nero 5.5. It should be noted with the latter, that you need version 5.5.10.9 or later – the updates can be downloaded from www.ahead.de (the Nero manufacturer’s site)

In use:

The manufacturer’s specifications are as follows:

Reads all DVD formats at 12x, all CD-ROM formats at 40x. For writing it offers DVD-R / RW, at 4x / 2x and DVD+R / RW at 4x / 2.4X, with CD-R / RW at 16x /10x.

So have I squeezed the full-spec out of my burner?

I would be surprised if I always got 12x read speed from the DVD-ROM reader, and 40x out of CD-ROMs - they are after all maximum values and as long as the sustained speed is above 2x for DVDs and 16x for CD-ROMs then this drive is as good as any other on the market...

Admittedly to date I have only burnt about 30-40 DVDs – I would have normally gone through two spindles at least of blank CDs in the same time - so from that point of view, the fact that I am not forced to burn as many CDs as I was is a good thing. I have also used the drive for copying CDs, and although the drive is not as fast as my other burner it has worked fine on copying CDs - especially the notoriously cheap “supermarket” blanks I have bought. Initially as far as DVD blanks was concerned I went for more expensive branded media - although now a 10 pack of Verbatim DVD-R blanks in jewel cases can be got for about EUR20 here in Austria - they burn fine at 4x, although for customers I usually burn at 2x – just as a precaution – to date I have yet to have a problem.

The same has been the case with the 3A Media DVD+R disks that I have also used. There has proven to be no problems with them either – in terms of the writer. The only problem I have encountered to date has been the fact that Nero has a slight bug which is wont to make your DVD blanks multisession disks, which can lead to them not being read by machines running old operating systems. Under Windows Millennium I spotted this before the burning began – and was able to manually set the DVDs to be burned in Disc-at-Once mode. This has been a point raised in various forums - and I expect one that might have now been fixed in Nero 6 - although after Nero 6's original jitteryness I decided to stick to Nero 5 for the time being.

With the 3A Media blanks being reliable I’ll probably stick to them for the time being although I do intend to upgrade the firmware as recommended by other reviews in order to make my DVD drive a multi-region one – this has not been a problem so far, but given the fact that I will probably hit the States to pick up some Region 1 DVDs very soon, I'll probably end up wanting to watch them on my flat panel until I sort out a decent home cinema set-up in Morgenhund towers.

I am intending, when work is less hectic to play test a sample of cheap unbranded blanks to see whether the NEC plays ball or whether the firmware fix mentioned in other reviews will be necessary. Given the fact that the DVD burner is primarily used for business purposes, I don't actively intend to muck about with it for warranty reasons, so will stick to the more expensive blanks for that reason alone - I think my customers would prefer me to spend an extra couple of Euro if I am delivering work which I am charging them hundreds or thousands or Euros for. In all fairness for your average home user – burning perhaps a couple of DVDs per month, then it is probably not worth modding the firmware – invalidating the warranty isn’t worth it.

Conclusion

All in all I am completely satisfied with the drive - the potential inconvenience that I might not be able to use cheaper blanks without modding the firmware, thereby invalidating the guarantee is not really a problem - and now that the Nero blip of multisession discs had been altered everything is running smoothly. Most importantly my customers are relieved that I am no longer sending stacks of CDs to my customers, instead a single DVD is coming through their letterbox, and of course saving postage fees when sent across countries and continents!

I am also archiving a lot of my old data CDs onto DVDs - four years of accumulating mp3s has produced a gargantuan stack of CDs - and those CDs will be recycled and tracts of my flat regained! I bet even the tree-huggers out there will be happy about that!

I can't give anything other that satisfactory for the instruction manual since I was able to use the drive without a manual - there are however manuals for download if you require them.
 

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