Now that I have an income, it's time for me to replace the DVD-ROM burner in my desktop, which died in November 2009. (I've been making do with Peg's laptop for all things burnt to disk; installing stuff has been a right bitch, though.)
So, after the first paycheck or two comes in, I want to get something that's sitting in or near the sweet spot between price and performance. What do people recommend/link? And is a Blueray drive a viable option yet?
Thank you.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Well the well known and recommended by you Yanks - Newegg has the following Sony laptop friendly Blueray & DVD burner
http://www.newegg.com/Pro...spx?Item=N82E16827118059 which when I've looked at their slim CD/DVD writers is on par with the brand name (HP, IBM/Levono) replacement part. As for the actual creation of your own blu-ray disks....I've yet to do so with the one I have, a side effect of the way I've installed it. The PCI-E SATA 2 card I'm using's got some driver issues which affects any attempts at burning disks.
--Rod.H
I've got a BD-ROM in my March-vintage system. I've yet to actually BURN anything, more from laziness and lack of the media to burn...
Works okay for me, but I am a bit disappointed that it's damn hard to play BluRay movies due to the MPAA and Player manufacturers not wanting folks to watch movies on any brand of PC with the option to rip the files to HD. Legal software to watch BluRay movies is about as expensive as getting a no-frills player, and apparently the new software has less functionality than the "obsolete" software that came bundled with my drive.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
Quote:Legal software to watch BluRay movies is about as expensive as getting a no-frills player, and apparently the new software has less functionality than the "obsolete" software that came bundled with my drive.
Yeah. If you want to watch BR movies, a stand-alone player is probably for the best.
BD's are really only good for writing out backups of large files/dowloaded series and the like.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
So far, I haven't seen a need, or had any sort of desire, to upgrade to BluRay here. Not even for backup. I'm really hard pressed to even consider it for dealing with graphic and video files. If I get one big enough it won't fit on a dual-layer DVD, I'll just go and buy a USB hard drive to use as a backup drive.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
I have serious doubts about blu-ray as a storage medium, since the writable disks are so expensive and usb drives keep falling in price. And for a reader it's very very hard to read from it which makes it generally useless on the computer.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Gotta agree, really. Blu-ray is no good as a computer storage medium. I'd suggest going with a DVD-RW drive of some sort (they're pretty cheap).
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead
Jeez, guys..
Bob, any of the $20 Samsung or Lite-On units from Newegg.com should work Just Fine. For CD and DVD purposes of the term 'burn', burning a disc is no longer a tough application.
Just make sure you get something (PATA, SATA, USB 2.0) you have a port for.
Happy Burning!
"No can brain today. Want cheezeburger."
From NGE: Nobody Dies, by Gregg Landsman
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5579457/1/NGE_Nobody_Dies
Very good. The last time I had to price a burner they were still at or above $100... If I had bothered to look after the current one crapped out, I might not have waited this long. Thank you all.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
One last note I'd like to add, just for the record... having a BD capable drive is nice if it comes with the software that allows you to play BD movies. For an on-the-go kinda guy like me, it helps make my laptop into that nice all-in-one entertainment package when I'm away from home... which is frequent these days. But if back-ups are what you're after, then an external hard drive is the only way to go, honestly. If you go that route, I recommend using a networked drive (gone blank on what they're called) so every PC on your network can use it for backup purposes. Sure, that may be putting your eggs all in one basket, but I suppose that what one may use BD archives for (redundant backup).
I actually saw a networkable hub at the thrift store that appeared to be intended to make most USB drives out there into a networked drive. I didn't buy it, in part because it didn't seem to have it's power brick, but also because I currently only have two computers my external hard drive gets used on.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
blackaeronaut Wrote:But if back-ups are what you're after, then an external hard drive is the only way to go, honestly. If you go that route, I recommend using a networked drive (gone blank on what they're called) ...
Networked-Attached Storage, or NAS for short. My home NAS is an enclosure from Linksys/Cicso with a pair of 1TB drives installed - if I was building it today, I'd go for larger drives, even though I'm, not even halfway to filling the drives I have yet.
(I have another 1TB USB drive to back up the NAS.)
JFerio Wrote:I actually saw a networkable hub at the thrift store that appeared to be intended to make most USB drives out there into a networked drive. I didn't buy it, in part because it didn't seem to have it's power brick, but also because I currently only have two computers my external hard drive gets used on.
Yeah, I'd be suspicious of thrift-shop electronics, too.
As for only having two computers that use the drive, do you ever have any visitors who bring laptops? If you do, there's more than two potential computers using the drive. Also, hooking the drive up to the LAN means both computers can use it at the same time.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
robkelk Wrote:Yeah, I'd be suspicious of thrift-shop electronics, too.
As for only having two computers that use the drive, do you ever have any visitors who bring laptops? If you do, there's more than two potential computers using the drive. Also, hooking the drive up to the LAN means both computers can use it at the same time.
The instances of another person connecting to my network is slim... and I'm unwilling to put that much trust in my wireless network security anyway.
And I've had reasonably decent luck with thrift store electronics, given my video game collecting fetish. Even my wireless network is (DD-WRT patched) from the thrift. At least part of it, anyway. Although my last attempt at buying a router didn't come out very well.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
JFerio Wrote:I actually saw a networkable hub at the thrift store that appeared to be intended to make most USB drives out there into a networked drive. I didn't buy it, in part because it didn't seem to have it's power brick, but also because I currently only have two computers my external hard drive gets used on.
I'd have picked that sucker up in a heartbeat, regardless of missing power bricks. During our move to San Antonio, we had to go through a 15x20x12 foot storage unit. That's 3600 cubic feet of random kipple. Afterwards, we now have a good sized box full of the damn things. Pretty sure we're set for spare power boxes.
And on that note, I am now wishing that all homes had a AC->DC converter to directly supply electronic appliances with DC voltage instead of screwing around with these little power boxes. Of course, that means a Matterhorn of paperwork as new standards are set up for that sort of thing.
The problem with trying to get rid of all those transformers is that the vast majority of gadgets want non-compatible combinations of volts/amps.
(well at least that's the case for the 5 power bricks I can find around my desk.)
So you would still need to do some sort of transformation at each one.
It's been long enough since my hard elec eng. classes that I forget if doing such things in DC is easier or more efficient than in AC.
But the only places I've heard of going to DC wiring were server rooms. And they have the benefit of racks and racks of hardware with exactly the same power requirements
-Terry
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"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy
By this point we're into a fair bit of topic drift, but my understanding was that using the power bricks was in a large part a matter of getting safety ratings faster and easier. The power bricks are setup in huge lots and get to spread the cost of being certified safe across gobs and gobs of units, while the smaller, lighter sets of electronics that aren't expected to be sold to every home in North America (or the electrically similar region of your choice) instead get a much simpler set of test that assume that the power supplies are working as described by a different huge set of rules.