[Torx]

Looking at newegg's top sellers and comparing the more popular vs reviews..
im seeing the NEC 7170A is more popular at $30
but the Samsung SH-S182M/BEBE has more reviews and is $33
What about liteon?

Also, has sata benefitted the burner scene at all?

[msgwtco]

SATA has not helped with burning since most CD/DVD Burners still don't even exceed ATA-33 Standards in read/write speed. Although there will probaly be a lot more SATA CD/DVD Burners in the future when the PATA standard gets phased out. I've already seen motherboards on newegg with only a single PATA Controller.

As for the DVD RW companies, Samsung usually has the best reliability out of all three listed.

[Torx]

i had a liteon that went dead on me after 2 years of abuse, this nec has been going strong for a good 4 years now or whenever it was first released.

so is lightscribe worth it and is it only for lightscribe media?
i dont see the need of buying a 25pk of expensive ass lightscribe media for my day to day use.. Unless there are 100pk lightscribe cdr and dvdr media im unaware of... I hear mixed opinions on the lightscribe..

[ThatHideousStrength]

I hate NEC.

[ivanolo]

I also had a Lite-On CD burner that worked fine for 2 years, but then it became slow to recognize CDs when they were inserted. It still worked in every other aspect, though. Before that, I had a Samsung CD burner that stopped being able to burn CDs.

Now I have an LG DVD-ROM (from 2001) and an LG DVD±R/RW drive, and both have worked wonderfully so far. LG would be my recommendation.

[chapel]

There are cheap sata drives you can get now. Of course there isnt much benefit in the speed department, but there is the reliability factor and knowing its going to work. Sata just is more reliable than ide, specially when it comes to modern motherboards. The P965 intel chipset doesnt come with an IDE controller natively, so 3rd party manufacturers had to install their own, well because of that, anything used on the ide channel isnt recognized by default unless the drivers are installed. Now if you use a sata drive, boom works right out of the box. Must be nice. Im thinking about picking up an 18x one for like 40~ bucks.

[super_Chris]

I bought a PATA NEC 16x DVD burner when they first started selling in the $30's. It died within a month. I bought the exact same drive again, and I've had it since. It's been over a year and is working fine.

[Miller]

i have 2 nec drives, one is a few years old, no problems an the other is a few months.

[Goofus Maximus]

My Samsung has been standing up well for me, but I have an older PATA model, and I don't know how the new ones stack up.

That said, Samsung has yet to fail me in any of their peripherals.

[mistawiskas]

I'm impressed with Samsung all the way around. Their products are leading in many categories and I plan on stock their plasmas/LCD's at the store.

[AdamHonek]

I would get the Samsung 183 model, it's like the 182 but SATA. Why still use IDE cables when SATA is so much better. I have one and all is well.

[Chris]

I had an NEC burner back in the day, and when i handled it before installation, it sounded like there was a pound of sand inside the thing. It would fail to burn disks constantly.

I now have a Samsung CD-ROM, CD/DVD-RW, and LCD Monitor.

<3 Samsung.