DVD Burner

which?

[Drastic]

Part of my new backup system will include burning drive images (norton Ghost) onto dvds.

I have found a toshiba model sd-r5002:
[toshiba.com...]

for about 175 bucks oem, or 225 with the software package.

Anybody have any experience with this drive? Any other suggestions?

[lazerzubb]

Have only used a DVD burner on a laptop a few times, have worked fine, be sure to buy good DVD cd's though.

The one you've found seem to be very slow, even though it burns dvd-r in 2x i would go for one which burns in 4x it might not seem much difference but when you burn 4,7gb it will feel like the earth has stopped.

[sem4u]

The Pioneer DVR-A05 is good and will burn a full DVD-R in 15 minutes at 4x.

[Brett_Tabke]

But what is 1x for a dvd player? Is it the same rpm as a cd?

[Kandevil]

I've heard rave reviews of the Sony DRU-500A DVD+-R/RW Internal. A friend of mine has been trying to get hold of one for a while now, demand is currently high for it in the UK.

This one burns at 4x on DVD-R and 2.4x on DVD+R

[edited by: Kandevil at 2:07 am (utc) on Feb. 24, 2003]

[lawman]

I'm almost positive that 1x read for a DVD is much faster than 1x read for a CD.

lawman

[gethan]

DVD 1X (11.1 Mbps, or roughly nine times the rate of a CD-ROM drive)

[h18000.www1.hp.com...]

One of those things that should have been easy to find out but wasn't...

Do DVD write and read speeds differ? They should be the same, like CD's.

[richardb]

Hi Drastic

Can recommend the Pioneer DVR-A04, no problems so far!

Speed isn’t an issue for me, hence buying the AO4, however the Pioneer support is pitiful (as you would expect from a large corp). lazerzubb comments are right on the money, choose a good book, before you start ;)

Rich

[Drastic]

Well I decided to hold off. Norton can't tell me if the toshiba drive is supported by Ghost.

I considered the sony, but read a couple of places they are having some kind of hardware issues, and oem drives are not sony branded. The drives are oddly hard to find in some places, and prices are inconsistent - something is not exactly right there.

I think 2nd gen dvd burners are still infants, and will look at this again later this year. Things should be more settled, more stable, and more inexpensive in 6 months or so.

In the mean time, I'll just rely on RAID mirror array, and hope nobody breaks in the office, the place doesn't burn down, or lightning doesn't strike. heh

[Brett_Tabke]

You have a cd burner right? Just back up your most important directories (which is usually data) and store them in an offloction.

Or use *gasp* microsoft backup and just do an incremental thing.