What can I say, most has been said in the previous two reviews.
I had the drive as a Christmas present from my children this year (December 2003). At the time, it was about as fast as it gets, faster models are available now and cheaper, but:
When they say X8 speed on the newer drives, you are only really saving about 15 mins on a full burn, so are you in a rush? I set mine to record when I go to bed, and turn off the monitor, in the morning my disk is waiting.
Check the NEC site for firmware upgrades, the newer ones flash the drive from within windows and this allows you to use a vast array of media brands (you flash at your own risk, if it fails NEC will not fix the drive for you, but saying that, I have had no problems to date). I tend to stick to blanks using the "ritek" dye, which are not expensive, but have never failed me, regardless of what data I was writing.
This drive is great for backing up your MP3 collection, although, I find that my homeDVD players do not like a disk with 1000+ tracks on it, although they play and backup on my PC so I tend to limit music to about a hundred tracks or so.
If you are going to backup your DVD film collection, beware, this may well be illegal in the UK, but DVD's, like CD's, are not bomb proof, so when I legaly purchase a DVD film, I make a backup copy which I use on a day to day basis, and put the oringinal away for the future (very usefull if you have children with sticky fingers).
With regard a film/movie backup, I use DVD shrink, a freeware programme, which is very intuitive to use, and allows you to "shrink" films to fit on a blank, home DVD disk (home blanks cannot store as much data as a commercial disk).
When I want to make my backup copy, I use copy toDVD, which only costs about $40US or £20 or so to download, use, and recieve a legitimate key to unlock the software. This is a great bit of software, which will burn your data/movie DVD's but will also burn your CD music / data disks. If you choose to make an audio CD from MP3 files, it will convert automatically from MP3 to CD audio, so the disk can be played on "normal" CD players.
This drive is no harder to fit than a standard CD drive, works very well on all the different media types I have tried (since the firmware upgrade) and well woth buying.
All the best
Rik
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Does all it is supposed to do. Good review. Maureen
leopard79 11.08.2004 23:04
Well done, I found this review really helpful and as you said, the other reviews give a lot of the technical stuff, though I think you'll need to add extra to get more vh ratings. Much better though and it worked for me!
Advantages: Reads practically everything. Writes to TWO formats (+RW and -RW) Disadvantages: None so far, but disk costs make it more important not to waste any
BNibbles 31.05.2003 (29.06.2003)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of NEC MultiSpin ND-1300A
Advantages: Reads practically everything. Writes to TWO formats (+RW and -RW) Disadvantages: None so far, but disk costs make it more important not to waste any
BNibbles 31.05.2003 (29.06.2003)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of NEC MultiSpin ND-1300A
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