What is the best cd burner? (No Lite-on's please)

[elpipetuanis]

Sorry to all those who have Lite-on cd burners. I have now been burned (no pun intended) twice with these burners. Because of these burners I have a new motherboard and before the new one I switched motherboards with another mobo that i had thinking the different chipset would fix it but no. Now I have a brand new mobo and a new hard drive. I have gone through 2 LTR-48246S's and both only wanted to work in pio mode only. I tried to make it work with dma (and yes i know how to turn it on). It just wouldn't work. So now i want to know which is a good buy that will work with the nforce2 chipset? I see that the ASUS CRW-4824A cd burner at newegg is pretty cheap. But is it good and not another lite-on clone? I am not bashing lite-on, i just want to get a cd burner to work. I had an old hp cd rw and loved it but they are way too expensive. Thanks for the help.

[Sammie]

Hello.
Just want to let you know that don't blame the Lite-ON, instead your chipset and you configuration. i don't know how much knowledge you have but simply "Intel" chipsets (E,G,PE,GE) are headache free. Stay away from AMD configurations. You just can't simply blame Lite-ON because most CD burners are rebadged Lite_ONs or use the same/similar chipset( Mediatek,Ricoh, etc.)
TDK
Sony
some Cendyne
LG
Memorex
IOMEGA

BUt if you just basically dislike Lite-ON i would recommend alternative CDRW
AOPEN CD-RW DRIVE 52x24x52

[elpipetuanis]

I am not bagging Lite-on, I have just had a lot of problems with it. I understand that they are rebadged with different names. I wish it would work correctly but it hasn't. I know they are a great brand, they just have not worked for me.

[coolestnitish]

Well, if you aren't satisfied with LiteOn's then you could go for LG, Plextor, Yamaha etc. Some of these may cost a little more, but they won't be LiteOn clones.
Personally, I would suggest LG over Plextor and Yamaha which are more expensive and slower. LG has a new 52x drive which looks really good.

[minchin]

Do you have problem with DMA under XP or Win2K or what OS?

Did you try to put drive by itself on 1 IDE channel and see if that helps?

Changed cables to verify?

In XP, I also had an experience where my HD cannot be recognized as being capable of DMA. The CDRW drive on the same IDE channel is detected as DMA (beats me)

What I did was:
1. Set the HD drive to (hardware profile -> ATA controller) not automatic detect.
2. Set the HD drive to use PIO.
3. Reboot.
4. Check the profile again. Make sure it is now in PIO mode
5. Set the drive to automatic detect.
6. Reboot.
7. For some reason, the drive is now detected as DMA capable.

It makes a world of difference.... I was wondering why it take me 45min to extract a DVD content to the HD....

While I understand the above may not be exactly for CDRW drives, but I found that when XP decided on something, it is not very good in detecting it again. Give it a shot and see.... maybe it would work....

Personally I love Lite-Ons....

Min

[jase]

Often drives have problems with certain mobo chipsets, and in my experience other drives with the same CDRW chipset will have the same trouble. So an LG 52x uses the same chipset as a LiteOn 52x, so will likely have the same problem.

As most drives use Mediatek chipsets now, you would probably be wise to look at a drive with a different chipset for a replacement. Examples would be the Mitsumi/MSI/Yamaha (Oak chip), Aopen/Artec (Ricoh) or Plextor (Sanyo). Another solution would be to switch off "32-bit addressing" in the BIOS, or set the drive to PIO mode 4. This would allow Windows to use Multiword DMA which, although a bit slower than UDMA, would be better than what you have now. A final possibility would be to buy a PCI IDE card (not RAID) and connect the CDRW to that. I'm using a Promise UDMA100 and it's working well.

[elpipetuanis]

Well I think I figured it out thanks to minchin. It was a combination of two things: the ata cable was ata 133 (which shouldn't matter i think), and the dvd rom that was the slave. I changed the ata 133 with a regular ata 40 wire cable and unplugged the dvd rom. Started right up and i just burned a 500MB cd in 2 min. I will have to figure out something for that dvd rom drive. I have a promise ultra ata 133 card in there, I might put the dvd on that. Oh and i did try to hook it up to the ata 133 card and it would burn but would not read any cds so that one was weird too. Thanks for all your help and please don't think i was raggin on Lite-On, I just wanted it to work.

Thanks

[Guzo]

put optical drives on first ide channel.
and hard on second

or if you have additional ide controller put hdds on controler and drives on mobo

i had problem with xp pro.
on second it would run udma, only mw-dma

i have via kt 133a chipset

hope you got lucky

[TheWizard]

LG! LG! LG!

[Albinoni]

Sorry, but I totally disagree to put optical drives on the first IDE channel, I strongly beleive that the HDD should be always be set to the Pri Master on the IDE 1 (IDE 0 on some motherboards) together with another device, therefore allowing you to set a master and a slave setting. Here's how I've got my setup done on my Gigabyte PIII mobo. In my PC I have the following devices:

Pioneer DVD ROM
Liteon LTR 48246S CDRW
Iomega internal 250MB zip drive
Maxtor 30GB HDD running both 98SE and Win 2000 Pro

On my mobo I've got the usual ports, like floppy, IDE 1 and IDE 2. Now pls note that the port that starts with the lowest number like IDE 1 or IDE 0, depending on mobo brand is your primary IDE port and this port will get first priority or detection over IDE 2 port, so I always hook or connect the HDD to the Pri IDE port. Also take note that you can only connect two devices to one IDE port.

So here's my setup:

On Pri IDE 1 Maxtor HDD and Pioneer DVD ROM, HDD is set to Master and
DVD ROM is set to Slave.

On Pri IDE 2 Liteon LTR 48246S and Zip 250 drive. Setting the Liteon to
Master and Zip to Slave

Hope this helps

[Burn2death]

LG!!!!

[cfitz]

LG! LG! LG!

LG?

LG!!!!

LG????

cfitz

[coolestnitish]

Take a look at the excellent review Ian did on LG's new 52x drive. It got an 8/10 compared to the 9/10 the LiteOn's got. But as you aren't interested in LiteOn's, this new LG drive looks nice. http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?reviewid=172
Same here: LG!LG!LG!

[cfitz]

Take a look at the excellent review Ian did on LG's new 52x drive. It got an 8/10 compared to the 9/10 the LiteOn's got. But as you aren't interested in LiteOn's, this new LG drive looks nice. http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?reviewid=172
Same here: LG!LG!LG!

Hmm. Maybe I was too subtle. The "LG?" texts in my post above link to the performance pages of Ian's reviews of LG's latest two drives, both of which garnered only 7/10.

cfitz

[TheWizard]

Umm, the person who started this thread never mentioned how fast of a burner he/she wanted. Therefore, the GCE-8400B and previous drives have scored 9/10. To be honest, I never understood why people always wanted the fastest drive on the market. What for? To shave a few seconds off the recording time? Doesn't make sense to me, especially since most of the new 48X and 52X drives have not had the same high scores as 40X and slower burners.

Overall, I love LG drives (both old and new). A 7 out of 10 for performance isn't terrible; LG makes up for it with other great things, like great customer service.

[cfitz]

Yes, no specific speed requirement was listed, and LG's older drives did score well. But if you are recommending LG based on their older drives, then you ought to make it clear:

Old LG drives 40x or slower!!!

Reading through the details of the reviews, I find that 7/10 is pretty bad, and LG's newest drives aren't nearly matching the quality of their older drives. As for customer service, while it has some value, it is definitely secondary or tertiary. I've never had to use customer service for any of my burners, and the best customer service in the world won't fix a bad quality burn from a lower quality drive. The only cure for bad burns is good media in a good drive.

cfitz

[TheWizard]

Originally, I recommended LG drives in general...new or old. If you asked me for a more precise answer, then I would recommend older LG drives. I feel all LG drives are good, some are just better than others.

[vspyr]

I would personally go for a TDK VeloCD 52/24/52 (although it is Lite-On based) or an ASUS 52/24/52. You can look at:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?reviewid=169 for TDK and

http://www.cdrlabs.com/reviews/index.php?reviewid=161 and

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Article ... W&Series=0 for ASUS

I haven't seen if there is a review for TEAC 552. You could take a look at this,too.

[Scour]

Hello!

The best drives i got:

1. Plextor PX-W 4824A
2. LG GCE 8481
3. Asus CRW 4816A


The worst:

1. Liteon 12101B
2. Acer 4x4x32

[dodecahedron]

what's the point of diggin up a 4-month old topic?
don't we already have enough "what's the best drive" topics running amok ?

[Scour]

[CowboySlim]

I use a Memorex badged LiteOn with Nero and InCD with Win XP Home and an Intel D845GEBV2 motherboard. Perfect.

Most likely, if you try all the workarounds suggested above without success, it's the Motherboard! Get an Intel - They just plain work.

Slim

[dodecahedron]

:(

no hard feelings!

[wicked1]

I have a MSI nForce2 motherboard and have 2 liteons,1 sony,1generic dvdrom, and 3 hard drives. They all work fine. liteon model 52246S works fine with that chipset.You ever think maybe your OS is whacked or maybe a different ide channel to try it on. BTW beforce the nforce2 I had a VIA chipset that the liteon worked with no problem.

[rdgrimes]

Since it's already been dragged up, I'll add to the thread. The only problems with Nforce boards and CDRW has nothing to do with LiteOn or AMD. If you use the Nforce IDE controller driver, no RW drive will work right, and HD's might not either. It's purely a driver issue. The plain old MS IDE drivers are the only ones working reliably on Nforce chipsets. the Nforce and AMD forums are loaded with this exact same issue.