NEC ND 2510A

For the most part, this is just another DVD burner in an already crowded market, but one or two things make this stand out from the crowd.

To start with it was one of the first low-priced drives to support dual-layer writing, allowing you to cram twice as much on to a single disk, although the price and availability of dual-layer media at the moment makes this less useful than it might be. Still, this should change soon enough...
...though, are its ability to cope with even the cheapest media available, and the fact that it'll burn as fast as it can regardless of the rating of the blank media.

Using a dynamically adjustable burning laser, the drive automatically adjusts power and speed to suit the disk -- if it detects an uneven dye surface (common on cheap blanks) it'll compensate; the burning process may slow down, but it's almost guaranteed to work. On good ... more

For the most part, this is just another DVD burner in an already crowded market, but one or two things make this stand out from the crowd.

To start with it was one of the first low-priced drives to support dual-layer writing, allowing you to cram twice as much on to a single disk, although the price and availability of dual-layer media at the moment makes this less useful than it might be. Still, this should change soon enough...

The most remarkable things about this drive, though, are its ability to cope with even the cheapest media available, and the fact that it'll burn as fast as it can regardless of the rating of the blank media.

Using a dynamically adjustable burning laser, the drive automatically adjusts power and speed to suit the disk -- if it detects an uneven dye surface (common on cheap blanks) it'll compensate; the burning process may slow down, but it's almost guaranteed to work. On good quality media it attempts to burn faster than the rated speed of the disk -- I bought a job-lot of Panasonic 4x disks, and they're consistently burned at between 6x and 8x with no problem.

Installing the drive is no easier or harder than installing any other; I purchased the OEM version so had no bundled software or drivers, but XP and OS-X will both recognise it with no problems.

Since buying this drive 6 months ago I've burned over 400 DVDs and CDs without a single failure, a remarkable achievement; while it may not support the fastest writing speeds, the fact that it burns quickly and reliably on the cheaper slower media more than compensates. This alone would make it worth buying, so the dual-layer capability is a nice bonus. Support for DVD-RAM disks would have been nice, but you can't have everything! 

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