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I've been doing some research for a little while now and still cannot decide on what the best drive is for:

1) Reading scratched and/or dirty dvd movie discs (dvd-videos) or discs that have been recorded at too high a speed

I have a lot of dvd movies backed up over the years...now when I try to watch many of them, most stutter or freezes/skip frames especially on the 2nd half of the movie. I have two NEC-3540 drives which may be the culprits. One has the original firmware but the other has the fast rip hack firmware which also allows you to write to some media at faster than the rated speeds.

I think this is the problem. Is there a dvd-rw, or even dvd-rom that I can buy that can help me copy these to good media? Or is it the media that's bad? I doubt it's the media because most people don't have problems with RiData discs...and many of these are 4X and 8X rated discs.

I'm going to ask you to vote on the best solution to backing up these bad dvd's....I was thinking of getting one of these dvd-rw's to try and copy these properly, keeping in mind I want to get the one that is less prone to this problem again in the future.

Just so you know, both of my NEC drives find so many bad sectors that it not only takes hours or days to finish burning, but when it does finish the bad frames/sectors were also copied. The same bad discs were better read with my Toshiba dvd-rom (less errors or none) but still the new discs skips those frames.

If you'll be suggesting other drives, please explain or prove why (links) and whether I have a good chance of getting a deal for it on eBay since the Plextor drives are so expensive. I'm in Toronto.

I'm leaning towards the LiteOn since I can get it in Toronto for $55 at Canada Computers. According to the reviews here, both the plextor and LiteOn drives seem to be good at reading scratched discs...with the plextor causing more errors (but is much faster at getting thru the errors).

ive yet to find a drive that lives up to the challenge like my patched pioneer dvr-108

For reading? I would say Benq and Pioneer

Wow...really? Pioneer I'm not too surprised with but BenQ? Care to explain why they'd be better at reading poor quality/scratched discs?

Which one would you recommend from this store, preferrably in the $39.99 range.

http://canadacomputers.com/index.php?do ... &id=CR.184

If anything, I'd choose a Lite-On. Their writing quality isn't the best, but they're very good readres.

I used to use a Liteon 167T as my reader, but after switching to a BenQ 1650 as my main reader I haven't looked back (less errors w/ the BenQ). Having said that, whenever I get read errors with the 1650, I go to a Pioneer 111 and it so far has read them. I'd recommend either, both are cheap, both are good writers also, with a slight edge to the Pioneer.

My Samsung SH-S182 has been able to read 2 scratched OPT DVD pressed discs this week that none of my other drives could read. Enabled me to make back up and working copies and saved me from having to buy the titles again. I was pretty impressed that it could do this because both discs were in bad shape from being mishandled - loaded with scratches.

Samsungs may be slow (8X) DL readers but they are evidently thorough.