DescentBB

I had a big Trojan-induced mess on my old clunker of a Dell over the past couple of days, compounded by the fact that my sole DVD+RW drive decided it didn't want to read my XP disk or Knoppix LiveCD. I managed to grab a CD drive off the ancient former family machine and pull off a repair install of XP to get things up and running, but that still leaves the DVD drive. Oddly enough, I seem to be able to get it to read DVDs, both burned RWs and movies, but putting in a CD just produces a repetitive clicking sound and no disk read. In lieu of some sort of firmware resolution and/or attempting to crack the thing open myself, I figure I might as well just replace it. I thought about upgrading to a drive with BD-ROM too, but the ones on Newegg seem to be a bit more than I want to dump into this machine, so I figure I'll go with a cheaper DVD burner. I guess I'd ideally want an IDE drive, since there's only one free SATA port on my mobo which I might want to use for a second HDD someday, but SATA is an option too. There are a ton of fairly cheap options on Newegg, so are there any brands I should look at or stay away from?

Not really, I have a Pioneer DVDRW (IDE) and a Lite-On BDRW (SATA) myself, both work just fine. I've also used NEC and Plextor drives in the past. The quality of DVD burners from pretty much any brand should all be good these days, but I would suggest sticking to the bigger names since firmware support usually continues longer that way.

ive had the best luck soo far with Sony/Optiarc SATA DVD-RW's 7060S 1.03 FW



they are a tad bit sensitive to scratches but they fly !

both asus and samsung are good brands. the asus one is an IDE, oddly enough.

Cool, thanks guys.