DVD writers

My DVD drive has just chewed up a disk by spewing it out diagonally. Doh! I swear they don't make drives like they used too....Time for a new one,

Anyway, someone here posted a link for me about 5 months ago about a great place where internal DVD writers were selling for summat stupid like 15 quid, I bought one from this place and somehow have lost all documentation of this purchase since then! I searched for it and the topic didn't seem to appear. Can someone post that link/company again? Ta :)

http://www.cclonline.com/

Start at £19 inc VAT

Cheers Dave, you're a star! I think it was you who gave me the link last time actually. :)
OMG, 1GB memory stick for a tenner! BARGAIN!
I'm there!

Just don't come complaining when your GPB 19 drive starts chewing up discs too. :-)

Let us know when it burns. Like one of mine did- Flames out the back kind of burns...

buy a pioneer there rock solid!

It's a Sony one I bought, it was meant to come today next day delivery but it still hasn't! CURSES!

[edit]
Actually, it just arrived, Yippee!
Although I'm busy today, so will probably fit it later.

liteon make sony most of sonys drives some are quite good but some are a bit picky with what dvds you use stick to ritek and you wont go far wrong.

Just for fun:


*breathe*


*breathe*


*breathe*

Jesus that was hard to read out! I agree with the Liteon/Sony statement, i've had countless DVD drives over the last three or four years due to cheap makes. The Sony and LiteOn drives are still going although I can't play POP:WW using them- the drive doesn't recognise the disk.

(Actually they do, but only because I fiddled with the pots on the lasers...)

Never seen ritek here, but have never burned a coaster with Imation or Memorex.

1) Pioneer DVD Rewriter.

2) Taiyo Yuden discs from (if you're in the UK) SVP Communications. (Taiyo Yuden unbranded only).


I used to do a duplication service for profit and if I tried varying from the above recipe, it resulted in problems.

Seriously, I cannot stress strongly enough that anything other than a Pioneer with TY discs just is not going to give the high quality result you often need.

Use 16X rated discs and burn no faster than 4X if you want uber-quality. Run them at 16X for non essential quick backups that you wont keep more than a few months.

That's what I always thought too... Except I've also had 16X TDK discs that skip like crazy if I burn video-DVD on them at 4X, and play flawlessly when burned at 16X. They're pretty much unwatchable when burned at 4X though, every few seconds the screen would hiccup or even freeze for a second or two. But not a single glitch when burning them at 16X instead, oddly enough.

Only problem with that is that most of the very best quality discs aren't rated for 16x specifically because burning faster reduces the quality of the burn. Ritek, for example, which I have to agree are by far the best discs you can buy, have most of their discs rated at 8x.

Woah guys you're scaring me now with all your stories of duff disks. Are we talking 16x CD or 16x DVD write?

Enay: DVD.

Heheh, I just did a search for this old thread to find the old link as I'd already forgot. My DVD drive died again! Can you believe it only lasted 7 months? I guess you get what you pay for, 20 quid for a drive isn't too bad a deal. Just ordered another cheap one. :) This is the 3rd drive bought in under 2 years. They don't make them like they used too!

Stop using them to hold your jam sandwiches and they might last a bit longer.

Enay - if you got it from CCL its covered by their one-year return to base warranty. They'll replace it for free if its genuinely dead.

7 months is longer than most of the product cycles :)

By the time your next one bites the dust, Blu-Ray recorders will be hitting the sub £100 mark.

I been watching those lately, and it's somewhat scary how much the price has come down in the last year, tempted to pick me up a decent brand in the next couple years if it getst o the CDN$150 mark.
(shame that it'd be primarily for backup storage since I doubt any of my buds would have a BluRay drive aside from a PS3, and PC games won't be using them {or HD-DVD, whichever wins the war} for a long-friggen time)

Anyhow, regarding burners, all my LG drives (2x CD-RWs, 1x DVD±RW) still work flawlessly here a couple years later, but then again, I also don't make heavy burn-usage of them, which kills the laser-diode faster I assume?

Lasers in burners certinaly do have a finite life. Quite short, in fact.

I used to rotate them out after 1000 burns. I don't keep track anymore because I'm now only using them for personal backups. A goodly number of my friends have various generations of Pioneer recorders in their machines. They mostly get used for reading discs, so they have a good lifespan left ahead of them.

I've burned well over 5000 discs on the last sony that I bought. Every once in a while I'll find where it's burned something that's totally unreadable but the software said it burned correctly. No biggie. Make another copy.

But I'd feel safe faaaaaar past 1000 burns.

Yeah, if these weren't so pricey, I would definitely look into one of these... http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-9010810-6710508?initialSearch=1&url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Blu-ray+burner&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

Kanati: You might, but I didn't. There was a noticable decrease in burn quality past 2000 burns on every Pioneer I ever used. Maybe they all had poor quality lasers, but I doubt it.

I didn't write the burners off, they ended up being sold for half the original purchase price. That's why a good number of my friends now have Pioneer burners ;)

They got a half-price burner that was maybe halfway through its life (maybe not even that) and I had assured quality for my burns. Everyone was a winner :)