DVD Drive Recommendation?

[Judaeus Apella]

I'm looking for just a normal DVD drive (read only), for gaming, music, etc. Problem is, every time I find a good one... its really loud or vibrates or gets insanely hot. We had a highly rated Yamaha about 4 years back. Best reviews we could find on a DVD drive... but it was SO LOUD!! Can someone PLEASE recommend a nice fast, cool running DVD drive, thats quiet? I'm not having any luck... none of the customer reviews I see are consistent. One person says its loud, the next person says its quite... :shrug:

Can someone help me out here? :confused:

[HuffPCair]

I just got a Samsung OEM one for Microcenter and it works great. It has lightscribe but I never use it.

[Judaeus Apella]

*sigh* I don't need a burner..

[zanzabar]

i dont think that there are dvd non burners anymore, u can get a samsung or rebranded samsung for $22 on newegg

[Judaeus Apella]

There are plenty, here's a few SATAs from newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000100055+1036507747+1038406820&Configurator=&Subcategory=55&description=&Ntk=&SpeTabStoreType=0&srchInDesc=
I just don't know which ones are noisy and which ones are quiet. :(

[jason str]

I have had good luck with Sony drives on many builds.

Samsung is good too.

[Judaeus Apella]

All I see for Samsung are writers.... you know anyone who sells them?

[jason str]

All I see for Samsung are writers.... you know anyone who sells them?

Newegg has a good selection of drives.

[Judaeus Apella]

Yeah, but none of the read only drives are samsung. lol

So no one knows of a good quality QUIET read only drive??

[zanzabar]

the asus ones are samsung, but they are 19 and a burner is 22

[Judaeus Apella]

Is it super quiet? I also read a review saying that it works with vista but refuses to run XP drivers....

And I need a reader cause there are some games that don't like them. I have a Splinter Cell game that does that. It won't install if you use a writer drive... which makes absolutely no sense. Why would you write to that disk? You'd read from that disk and write to a blank if you were trying to copy it... lol

I have a really nice writer drive, a SATA Plextor. :D

[zanzabar]

thats a game with starforce or the extra malicious sucurom u shouldent install it at all. unless u get a cracked install

[Judaeus Apella]

I looked up those two programs you just mentioned on Wiki. Interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. I see bioshock has the extra nasty one. :( I was hoping to eventually play that one day. What kinds of problems does it cause? Any other games I should avoid that have this crap installed on them?

[zanzabar]

no bioshock has the activation one for securom (pain but not the malicious one) but it also has it patched out, there is starforce that kills your disk drive (i can vogue for it, i have 2 dead drives), or the securom that locks your drives in PIO mode if u have any burner and makes u have to use mounted images only or reformat (ive also had). and tom clancy games almost have one of them and when the really malicious ones were starting they used them

[Judaeus Apella]

Holly crap... people should sue them! Destroying people's private property is a crime, I don't care what their excuse is. What games have this that I should stay away from? And don't they put a warning lable on the game box?

[zanzabar]

securom got patched, and starforce is in russia so u cant do anything to them and ubisoft got sued but they dropped starforce and it ended up being unprovable in court so they argued to not use it and the lawsuit was dropped. now we have securom that is useless to stop piracy but it limmits installs and lets companies track hardware and collect info on people computers when they activate and can allow securom ring0 remot access potentially since it auto updates with a stealth process. its all vary ugly and if u look at what games for windows live dose thats even more scary since its installed onto the kernel and has no integrity checks or signatures from MS to use it

[Judaeus Apella]

Wow, you must be getting tired. Edit that tomorrow when you've gotten some sleep. I'm goin to bed as soon as I post a few deals I found in Newegg on the deals area of XS.

[Sparky]

Why just a reader? Hard to find ROM drives anymore, the burners are only a couple bucks more and you have a much wider selection of drives. In my experience samsung drives are usually quieter and more rattle-free. I really liked the NEC drives but they don't make them anymore :( I'm never getting rid of my IDE NEC burner!

[GregSG]

How bout Lite-On? They seemed to be really good and popular

[JayG30]

Agree with others here. Samsung DVD Burners are excellent drives. Cheap, excellent and accurate burns, very very quiet when reading, and one of the quietest drives I've owned during writing as well. Unless you have a certain reason you can't have a drive in the computer that is a burner as well (business preventing data copying) than you should just get one as it won't be any less good than a regular DVD drive. I think the 203B model has been discontinued for some time and use to be a favorite. I'm pretty sure I've been using a 203N which seems to be pretty much as nice. The other popular model is the 223 I believe. There is a site that does extensive testing on these. CDFreaks.com is one.

[Judaeus Apella]

For all of you asking why, read above. But I've decided I don't need one. I'm just going to avoid games like that from now on.

[IronWarrior]

Get a blu-ray, they pretty cheap now and why not a burner as well?

[Humminn55]

I've had very good luck with the both the Samsung Super Write-Master and the Pioneer 18X DVD-RW drives at Microcenter ($25 and $19 respectively)....both have loaded any game I cared to load and both run quite quietly. Of course, the closest Microcenter to you is Fairfax, about an hour or so drive up I-95.

And, unfortunately, the Pioneer is a beige drive, but Krylon's satin black Fusion spray has always produced good results on that drive (takes a few minutes to take the faceplate off, clean w/alcohol, paint, let dry...and it drys quickly, then snap the plate back in place.)

[Judaeus Apella]

Does anyone read the rest of the thread if they have a question? The answer is right there in post #11, yet everyone keeps asking the same question over and over again. :(

[IronWarrior]

Does anyone read the rest of the thread if they have a question? The answer is right there in post #11, yet everyone keeps asking the same question over and over again. :(

Most likely a bad drive than, I never had any issues with my LG drive not wanting to install games or doing anything that it shouldn't be doing.

It reads and burns just as it is meant too. :cool:

[B.E.E.F.]

Does anyone read the rest of the thread if they have a question? The answer is right there in post #11, yet everyone keeps asking the same question over and over again. :(

So what are you looking to buy exactly?


:sofa:



Just get whichever is quietest. You won't save any money or time by looking for a DVD-ROM drive.

[Judaeus Apella]

After learning that I should just stay away from games with that problem, I'm going to just stick with my plextor for now. If I see one on sale for dirt dirt cheap, then I'll probably buy it. I plan to get a Blue Ray later on anyway, cause I'm going to have dual OS's. XP and Win7. If I can get Win7 beta running early on, I'll try to find a blue ray drive on sale. If not then I'll upgrade to retail 7 in August - September then get a blue ray afterwords.

[reberto]

Burners are super cheap now and are slightly faster than plain ROM drives. A SATA DVD-ROM drive is $18, a SATA DVD-RW drive is $22 and it's faster.

RW (with free shipping) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106263
ROM (without free shipping making it more expensive than the RW) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106276

[Judaeus Apella]

.........lol

[Richard Dower]

Personally i would go for a Blu-Ray combo drive, a DVD burner and Blu-Ray player combo...it's kinda future proof...Newegg has some nice drives on sale that offer this. SATA optical is the way to go.

[Quest_7F]

Good Case, decent drive and a good case door :up:

[Sparky]

Sorry :yawn:

I've not heard of a game not installing because of a burner. That's downright stupid if the developers made it like that on purpose, considering the majority of PCs have burners now :rolleyes:
It might be easier to find a ROM in PATA, I know it is old skool but so are ROM drives.

Is there a list of games that are known to hate burner drives?

[reberto]

Is there a list of games that are known to hate burner drives?

I don't think there is one because I've never head of such an issue