I bought a weird looking external burner for $9. It came in a leatherette bag which is unusual. Not only is it first rate build, it has a relatively hard to get first rate CD-R drive in it from mitsumi, one of the top 5 ever made. All for $9! For those reading, stock up on nice cd-r and dvd-r drives, they are going to be impossible to get soon. The only ones out now are ALL based on the same chipset, just a different case around the same chipset from sony.
I have a pretty nice DVD burner (internal) in my desktop. It's a LITE-ON, I think. Compared to drives I'd owned before that, it's really fast. Pretty much the only thing I use it for now is ripping CDs (which it does very fast), and occasionally playing DVDs or PC games on disc. I very rarely ever burn discs anymore. You can't really give people stuff on CD-Rs or DVD-Rs like you used to, since a lot of computers now don't have optical drives. It's still good for burning DC games, though. My dad got an external Blu-ray drive recently and it works pretty well, but again there's not much reason to use it when I have a PS3.
Any link to where you bought this ASSEMbler? Was looking for a cheap external dvd drive (reader). As for CD-R, I offered myself a yamaha crw-f1ux a few years ago. A blessing for DC games and overburning.
Great find and sound advice. All of my CD/DVD burners were made before everything became too similar or nothing more than rebranded cheap junk. They work well for now, but now you've got me wanting to stock up like crazy.
I find its rare the lasers or anything actually go on cd drives, rather the belts get all crappy and stop opening
I always have an eye open for old Plextor drives. but keep an eye open for other things as well such as kreon, 0800 drives, lite-on drive that can read GD-Rs etc.
My current one is a Sony Optiarc AD-7260S. It has a NEC MC-10045 chipset. Here's a review with internal pics: http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleId=28630 It's a bit noisy, but worked flawlesly so far. Way better than previous ones i used from Samsung and LG. I read LITE-ON have good drives, but never had one. Honestly i miss CD drives from the 90's. I had an Acer and a couple Creative's (from multimedia kits) that were super fast for it's time and very quiet.
Any old pioneer, plextor, mitsumi or ricoh drives are good to pick up. They have really expensive transport mechanisms for the laser, versus a greased plastic slider. Some even have all brass with teflon inserts.
I used to have a slot-loading Pioneer DVD drive. It was read only, it didn't burn discs. It was one of the first slot-loading DVD-ROM drives, I think. It seemed really cool at the time.
I have an old Plextor 8X that I'd love to fire back up again (especially to burn for older systems), but it's external SCSI and I have no idea how to get it to talk to my MacBook Pro. Any tips? I still have the Mac G3 with which I used it in the past, but that machine went belly-up a while ago. My LightScribe drive also recently croaked, and I was dismayed to discover there's just about nothing left on the market that supports it.
You might be able to use an SCSI to USB adapter. You'd need to find drivers for it though, and with a drive that old it's unlikely that drivers exist for newer versions of OS X.
I suspect you're right -- if drivers ever were around for OS X, they probably went out with PPC. (It's a PlexWriter, 8x read/20x burn, can burn CD-Rs, reads CD-RW.) I guess that's another reason to either get a Windows or Linux partition up and running, eh?
Maybe, you could have difficulties getting drivers to work with Windows or Linux as well, depending on which version you're running.
I have a Matshit SW-5583, it came with the $20 case I bought used. It reads my windows installation disc. I am happy.
i got a couple of drives (6 total) here, 2 of which are pretty new (AFAIK) and the rest being old ones (manufactured between '00 and '03). they all work, but whenever ill get my hands on more ill take em
I saw the title of this topic, and was somewhat worried as to what kind of service you'd purchased, Kev! lol I've seen hundreds of dead lasers on drives - they die well before the belts, usually. If used enough, that is. Personally, I had several Pioneer DVD-RW lasers die. Nice drives, but quite high failure rates.
