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Building new highend system want the best combo rom drive available any suggestions (looking for preformance)
Thanks

Probably the LiteOn 166s would be a good choice. Very fast DAE, pretty fast dvd ripping without a speed limit of 2x like some dvd drives.
You can find these online pretty cheap or Best Buy sells them in the Buslink DR16 boxes unless they've changed OEM vendors since I got mine. It also apears to be able to rip most protected audio cd's if thats something you might need.

Do you mean a DVD-ROM drive that reads CD's also, or do you mean a combo drive that reads DVD-ROMs and CD's and burns CD's, or do you mean a DVD burner that does all of the above and burns DVD's?

All DVD-ROM drives read CD's as well. The 166S is not a combo drive, it is just a DVD-ROM.

cfitz

CD Rom drive that reads DVD's also.
I should have been clearer
Have a Lit On 522446 cd-rw
Can't I use cd-rw to read disks also?but has no DVD capability

Okay, then what you are looking for is a DVD-ROM drive. A "combo drive" these days means a combined DVD-ROM and CD-RW drive. And yes, you can use your CD-RW to read CD's as well as burn them, but it won't read DVD's.

It has always been possible to read CD's in a CD-RW burner, but there was a time when this wasn't recommended, since burners were much slower and costlier than just plain CD-ROM drives. But those times are gone, and you can use your CD-RW as a reader without worries.

As for what to get for a DVD-ROM drive, here are some opinions from a thread in the DVD forum:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=10254

cfitz

I have heard that Lite-On DVD drives are good, but I haven't owned one. I only have CD-ROM and CD-RW drives (maybe time to upgrade ).

cfitz wrote:It has always been possible to read CD's in a CD-RW burner, but there was a time when this wasn't recommended, since burners were much slower and costlier than just plain CD-ROM drives. But those times are gone, and you can use your CD-RW as a reader without worries.


cfitz

There was also the worry of wearing out the much more expensive CD burner. For my first burner that was about a $160 difference, in current burners it's more like a $25 difference.