Drives > Less than 30 GBP Drives > by Optical Storage

Advantages: plug in and use
Disadvantages: none so far

Having recently had my computer pack up on me whilst moving house I decided to go out and get a new all singing all dancing one to replace it. What I did not even think of checking out as did it have a floppy drive on it! And of cours like a lot of modern machines it did not. Well I only use the floppy to back up my accounts and take them to the accountant so he can do my year end, which i had done on the old machine so when the disk came back there ...
...these drives as i did not want to open the case and start poking about. Talk about easy I plugged it into the usb and away windows xp whent and installed it and allocated it drive a so it worked with my trusty old accounts program with no messing about. compared to the fixed drive on my old computer i find it a bit slow but so far very reliable and thats about all you can ask from a simple divise such as a floppy drive. ... Read review

Advantages: Very reliable, quick and easy to use
Disadvantages: None other than it does not read RAM discs

...or write to these, which is the only downside, but for me is not a problem as i dont use RAM discs. NEC is a brand you can trust. Any questions or if i have missed a point you would like cleared, please leave a comment in my guestbook. ... Read review

Advantages: Well known brand.
Disadvantages: none

To begin with, it loks nice. The simple front design does away with exterior volume dials and headphone jacks, all there is, is one open/close button. It was incredibly easy to install. All i had to do was slot it in (making sure my jumper settings were correct for my set up) and install the cables into it. I used NERO to find out the results. To test the DVD i used CSI:Miami the game. Eject time: 1.62 seconds Close time: 1.56 seconds Spin-up ...
...DVD is 16x). Spin-down time (Time taken to reach standard revoloution rate after reaching fastest.) Spin -up time: 5.14 seconds Spin-Down time: 3.81 seconds Time taken for disc recognition: 10.05 seconds I would recommend this drive becasue it is simply fit and forget. I have given the instruction manual a totally unhelpful rating becasue it didn't come with one. With the drive you also get power DVD 5 ... Read review

Advantages: Very, very cheap; SATA; Fast; Reads/Writes most DVD formats
Disadvantages: Only comes in beige; No DVD-RAM writing (Read Only)

...REVIEW I bought my Pioneer DVR-212D, a few days ago for just £11 inc. VAT, BRAND NEW, from eBuyer.com. I hope you agree that's an incredible price for a S-ATA DVD rewriter. I only really needed the Pioneer drive to aid in testing the functionality of another more current P-ATA DVD-RW drive that was exhibiting some very odd behaviour that I wasn't absolutely certain was the drive's fault, so I wasn't too fussy about it being highly specified. Having ...
...the drive vertically. Being Pioneer I imagine longevity is a given, at least here in my household they have an enviable reputation for reliability. I have never managed to break anything I have bought from them in the past. It doesn't seem to matter what quality of disc you present it with either, it just accepts any old tat. Even the really nasty 8x reject DVDs my local computer emporium tries to pass of as quality gear work in this drive, a welcome ... Read review

Advantages: ummmmm
Disadvantages: Doesn't work very well, slow, intermitently recognises disks, poor back up service, need I go on?

I ordered my Freecom DVD Recorder LS USB 2.0 after my CD/DVD drive packed up on my 15 month old HP Desktop. I wanted it mainly to load CD ROM and burn DVD's from movies already converted to DVD format on my hard drive. Being that my PC had no disk drive I relied upon this external drive to load the bundled DVD burning software (Roxio 9). This took several days and many attempts. Then I tried burning my first DVD. After taking 3 hours to do a task ... Read review