by ionian on Tue May 06, 2008 12:42 am
Hi!
I would suggest against the Asus E616A3T.
I bought one about a month ago and it's DVD read speeds are pitiful.
It rips CDs fast into Itunes, but it STARTS reading a single layer DVD at 4-5x and gets up to about 8x. It takes about 10 min to read a SINGLE LAYER dvd! I'm very disappointed.
After poking around on forums it turns out that this drive has a riplock on it to prevent high speed DVD Ripping. To make matters worse I can't find any hacked firmware that kills the riplock and from what I can gather on other forums there probably won't be any since most people now are focusing on DVD Reader/Writers and the upcoming Blu-Ray drives so the chances of anyone taking the time to write hacked firmware for it is practically nil.
Aside from the fast CD ripping speed, it really let me down for a SATA reader and I'd return the damn thing but I bought it from NewEgg and it's more of a pain in the ass to box it up and mail it back so I just kept it.
Never thought I'd see the day when my IDE reader/writer could rip a DVD faster then my SATA reader.
Thanks,
Ionian