Pioneer DVR 106

...£100. When I saw the Pioneer DVR – 106 drive available for £88 at Dabs.com I did not hesitate in ordering the drive which duly arrived just two days later.

Now a problem that faces consumers when they decide to buy a DVD recorder drive is that there is more than one type of blank DVD media that can be recorded upon, these are DVD-R and DVD+R. Many people have argued long and hard extolling the merits of each different type, but never ...
...completely safe though with the Pioneer DVR – 106 because the drive is multi format. This means that DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW can all be used and written to with ease so compatibility worries disappear.

Also worthy of note is that the DVR – 106 is a CD-R and CD-RW recorder as well, this was particularly beneficial as far as I was concerned as my old CD-R drive was starting to show its age and one or two mistakes had started ... more

On a never ending quest to improve my computer set up I decided I needed to purchase a DVD recorder drive of some sort. Backing up my important data using my CD-R drive was a time consuming operation which used four CD-R`s every time. I had been put off by the high price of DVD recorder drives while they remained fairly new but over the past few months prices have dropped to such an extent that a DVD recorder drive can now be bought for under £100. When I saw the Pioneer DVR – 106 drive available for £88 at Dabs.com I did not hesitate in ordering the drive which duly arrived just two days later.

Now a problem that faces consumers when they decide to buy a DVD recorder drive is that there is more than one type of blank DVD media that can be recorded upon, these are DVD-R and DVD+R. Many people have argued long and hard extolling the merits of each different type, but never the less I was concerned that I would find myself with an obsolete DVD recorder drive in a years time, (I am sad to say I was one of the few who bought a Betamax video!). This problem is made completely safe though with the Pioneer DVR – 106 because the drive is multi format. This means that DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW can all be used and written to with ease so compatibility worries disappear.

Also worthy of note is that the DVR – 106 is a CD-R and CD-RW recorder as well, this was particularly beneficial as far as I was concerned as my old CD-R drive was starting to show its age and one or two mistakes had started occurring during CD recording. Add to that the fact that the DVR – 106 is also a standard CD-ROM and DVD – ROM player and it seems there is very little this drive does not do.

The Pioneer DVR – 106 I bought was OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and as such came with nothing more than a two page multi language photo copied instruction leaflet. Installation is straight forward and takes no more than five minutes, simply use a vacant drive bay in the computer tower, and plug in a spare electric cable and the IDE Interface cable. A check must also be made at this time to see how any other drives are configured, this means that if you have another drive and it has its jumper set to “Master” the new drive must be set to “Slave”, I do not know the reason for this but bitter experience has shown me in the past that if two drives are set to the same jumper setting all sorts of problems ensue. With all of the cables connected, including an audio cable leading to the sound card, the drive can be screwed into place and the computer tower closed.

With my computer restarted Windows XP detected the new drive and chose one of its own drivers to work it, the drive shows up in “My Computer” as a DVD-RW drive and that is the installation process complete. The open/close operation is smooth and silent as I insert a blank BulkPaq DVD-R and Windows XP detected that I had inserted it and asked me which function I wished to carry out. My first test was to back up all of my important data which weighs in at a hefty 2.5 GB, I use Roxio EasyCD Creator 6 for all of my copying needs and the program detected that there was a blank DVD inserted and advised me that I had 4482 MB of free space available. The Pioneer DVR – 106 can write to blank DVD’s at up to 4 speed but I elected to try it at 2 speed for my first attempt, I selected the files I wanted copied and clicked the burn button. The drive sprang into life almost instantly with its little green light twinkling excitedly, the process took about 20 minutes and there was no discernable noise from the drive, when the copying process was complete the Pioneer DVR – 106 ejected the disk to signify it had done its job. The disk was copied properly with on problems at all.

My next use of the DVR - 106 was to copy a DVD movie, (purely for my own personal use you understand), and again the drive performs well. The burn process was similar to that of the one I did to back up my data, but I elected to increase the burn speed to four speed just to see the time difference involved. Again the burning of the DVD-R passed without incident and took just ten minutes.

I cannot recommend the Pioneer DVR – 106 highly enough, while I was researching which drive to get it was constantly receiving good reports from all who had it. At £88 I believe I have bought a bargain and I guess that the prices of all DVD recorder drives will continue to fall which will place them firmly within most people’s budgets. I have listed below the speeds of the various operations the Pioneer DVR – 106 performs.

CD read speed: - 32x
DVD read speed: - 12x
DVD-R write speed: - 4x
DVD+R write speed: - 4x
DVD-RW speed: - 2x
DVD+RW: - 2.4x
CD write speed: - 16x
CD-RW speed: - 8x
2 MB cache
 

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