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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."
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.
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.