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An Exhaustive 16X DVD Burner Roundup
CrzyP writes "AnandTech has put together an extensive roundup on eight, count 'em, eight 16X DVD burners capable of writing to dual-layer media. Some of the big names on the list include Pioneer, NEC, LG, Sony, MSI, and more. They explain in detail the current technologies implemented into the newer drives, like bitsetting and error control as well as run their reading/writing benchmarks on 16X and dual-layer media."
The decision for me is being swayed towards the NEC just because it has some very nice hacked firmware.
I wonder when the big companies will start catching on that they're not offering enough in their firmware, and sales are being lost due to that.
Newegg seem to have some nice deals on the NEC and Pioneer.
#include <sig.h>
Bleh. When will Toast come out of the dark ages and support even half of the advanced features that burners can do these days?
Image-on-media? Kinda dumb, but no, can't do it. Media compatibility check? Nope. Report on confidence of burn success? Nope. Accurate time estimation? Nope. Statistics on disk readability? Phbt, dream on.
I will say this- Toast used to be the best burning program around, PC or Mac. Now, it's quite clearly been eclipsed. In fact, nothing on the Macintosh platform comes close in terms of support for advanced features on todays' drives.
Please help metamoderate.
The installation of (most) Operating sytems is disk based, not so much CPU based. So your encoding rate is likely not tied to well to how fast you can install Windows.
:) ) ...
/path/to/image/image.name
... lots of crap running in the background... detracts from the performance, so why run a graphical environment when one isn't needed? Heck I (or several others here) could whip you up a dialog based text/curses interface in short order to present you with your images and select which to burn. Then you'd just run that as your login shell and be done with it. You'd mount your root (and image) filesystem(s) as read-only and be quite secure and stable. In the event of a power outage or hardware failure the only thing lost would be the disc that was being burned.
... hmmmm ...
At the risk of sounding like a Linux Zealot (not that I am not one of course
If you are going to have a second OS just for burning the image to the disc, you could save yourself a great deal of headache by installing a small Linux partition on there instead.
You could even install X with a minimal window manager such as Blackbox or fluxbox, and only the minimal x-bsed cd/dvd burning tools. Or even smaller, just use the command line tools such as
cdrecord dev=/dev/dvd speed=16
(no that isn't a typo; cdrecord burns dvd as well)
That could (depending on OS chosen) be less hassle then setting up and trimming the fat from a Windows2k install, and take up a lot less space (say sigificantly less than 100MB if you went the text route -- a binary gentoo should do that easily enough) (and possibly time).
Just make a small partition for the Linux install, a small swap partition, and make a large Fat32 partition if you want Linux to modify images, or a large NTFS partition if all it'll do is read the images.
As you say:
Heck, this could even be done on a "live" cdrom. Then you could duplicate this on multiple machines just by booting from cdrom. Or if your motherboard supported it, stick it on a memory card or other persistent solid state memory device and boot from there.
This type of setup is in fact one of the areas Linux quite excels: as a small dedicated purpose machine.
Maybe someone should make bootable cdroms for this
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I recently got a DVD burner and dumped a bunch of stuff off my hard drives (I have a combined total of 320 gigs, and sadly it was almost full). This was a few months ago, but even then I was able to get media for 50 cents/disc, which is like 11 cents/gig.
I've been pricing hard drives off and on as well (I like to stay informed for when I'll get a new computer). The best price/size ratio I've seen in an internal hard drive is 50 cents/gig, and external hard drives are more expensive. That means that to equalize the cost, 4/5 of your DVDs would have to end up as coasters, and I personally have never burnt a coaster.
So currently, DVDs cost 1/5 of the price for equivalent amounts of space (and even if you make double copies of everything, it's still significantly cheaper), and that's likely to swing more towards DVDs as time goes on. An external hard drive may be more convenient for you (not sure if it would be for me, but to each his own), but price/size isn't a valid argument for hard drives over DVDs.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
A 16x NEC DVD burner is under $70. A spindle of 100 DVD+Rs is $47 according to Newegg -- same brand I use. They're 4x, but that's plenty fast for infrequent harddrive release for me, and faster media is only just a matter of time.
That's $120, which is probably within $10 of a 200 GB hard drive. This gets you 470 GB of storage (using the same 1000 MB = 1 GB the hard drive does), and I'd almost guarantee that it can burn all 100 discs, unless you get a defective drive. Even if you burn everything twice, you're still probably getting more for your money.
Now, I'm sure i've burned over 100 CDs on my 4 year old drive, and it's still going strong. I'd expect similar longevity for the DVD burner, but I don't know any statistics on how long they actually last. Being able to burn hundreds of discs wouldn't surprise me, in which case the cost of the drive is pretty spread out.
I don't have SATA, so I can't comment on that. Personally I'd feel like I'm wasting an SATA port on the DVD burner. They can't come close to saturating the bandwidth, and most motherboards only come with 2 or 4 channels, so I'd feel like I'm wasting them where they could be better reserved for new hard drives when I need them (I still like having tons of hard drive space for stuff I'm going to use; I only burn to DVDs when I'm puting it in storage), which can make better use of SATA's capabilities.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
What I really would like to see is a feature that checks the quality of the recording while burning.
I own a Nec ND2500-A and although this is one of the better DVD-Recorders it once in a while produces coasters - and I only use quality media.
You won't recognize this beforehand, you try to read the DVD's back and recognize that your data is lost due to read errors.
This is _very_ annoying and I still found no solution to this.
So to anyone who uses DVDs for backups: Use a burner that supports readout of PI/PO errors and check every DVD you burned afterwards. At least I have not found a better solution to check if you are burning coasters.
It does a tad more than bad sector remapping.
Yes the DVD spec has all of those features, but nothing *implements* them.
MRW allows you to put in a new disk, and withing a few seconds/minutes you can start putting data on it. None of this messing around with compiling and burning data. Opps i forgot a file, lets do it all again, another 10 minute burn. With MRW you just put the file there and its there. If you didnt want the file, delete it. Simple, and 'it just works(TM)'.
Easywrite and MRW (the same?) is hopefully a standard that will take off. I have 3 computers with 3 different burners that read each others MRW disks (they all run InCD). Another computer with a non MRW drive popped up a helpful webpage with a driver to read the disk and it just worked also.
I played with the early incarnation of UDF with old versions of InCD (V3?) and some other program that was on the GF's notebook. I admit they were crap and just would not work (not to metion having a really long format before you could not use the disk)
And if bad sector managment is so hard, how does old fashioned magnetic media work with it? At least it gives you the ability to use a disk with a defect rather than just not being able to get your data off of it.
And this is the same market that buys stuff from spam, telemarketers, and dodgy-computers-r-us, and expects CDR to delaminate, harddisks to last 12 months, and bugs to normal in their software. Someone has to market it so they will buy it. (why do people still buy coke/pepsi when there are much cheaper colas?)