I would like the Hardware Guru's opinions

[Shakie]

ekÆsine, I have heard nothing bad about them. What reviews are you reading? I am very curious.

Also with the External DVD Burner, I am trying to kill two birds here: My laptop doesn't have a CD-Burner, only a DVD-Rom and Floppy (it was given to me- I can't complain) so with an external burner, I could take with me and also burn DVDs from my desktop.

The 9800 AIW is a lock. Thanks for the input guys.

 

[ekÆsine]

i had gotten a pulled sony u12a 4x dvd burner which is the same hardware as sony DRU500A, the difference is the firmware version. my problem was that my burner recognised my media as 4x but only burnt at 2x. some DVD's would not read at all unless i used neroinfo tool, strangely it read after i started neroinfo.

basically what i gathered from reading many threads on the firmware website was that sony dvd burners only work with certain recordable DVD's (mostly the more expensive one, hmm i wonder why? (royalty fees to sony probably to add the dvd's to their compatability list).

if your sony DVD burner works on all your media and at the right speed you will be lucky. flashing firmware on a sony burner from what i have read is very difficult and may not fix it or make the drive more unstable.

i think this is where i read most of this, not 100% sure. notice how the thread is 6 pages long and full of complaints? hope you like reading:

http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=16646&postdays=0&postorder=asc

 

[heywire]

Hmmm... I've got the Sony DRU-510A and I burn cheap $.70 4x discs all day long... the only coaster I've ever had was because I accidentally dropped the files in the root folder instead of VIDEO_TS.

 

[Shakie]

Thanks for the link, ekÆsine. Time to go research.

That is basically the same as the one I want heywire, only mine is a 510UL (I'm guessing for external).