READ AND WRITE SPEED
There are a few facts to consider before buying a new optical drive: read and write speed, the interface or labeling technologies. Read speeds for DVDs and CDs really haven’t changed for years due to physical limits imposed by high spindle speeds. Write speeds have kept climbing, though, reaching 24x with the latest generation. This sounds impressive, but the real-life impact on disc write times is actually rather small. All modern DVD burners write data in CAV mode at constant angular velocity, which means that the disc spins at a constant RPM. As a result, the write bandwidth starts at rather slow bit rates and reaches its maximum when writing to the disc’s outer tracks. This is where 24x speed has its greatest impact. The write speed issue was even more significant in the case of double-layer discs, where the recording time is much longer than with single-layer discs.
A brand new 24x DVD burner doesn’t cost more than $40 and will probably be closer to $30. For DVD base speed, or "1x speed", is 1.385 MB/s, equal to 1.32 MiB/s, approximately 9 times faster than CD's base speed. For Blu-ray drive base speed is 6.74 MB/s, equal to 6.43 MB/s. In theory, there are significant advantages, such as much decreased recording times, new disc labeling technologies, slightly decreased power consumption, and SATA (rather than PATA) interfaces. However, the differences in real life require consideration.
It’s certainly possible to record single layer discs at 24x. Unfortunately, true 24x media is difficult to get; hence, we had to use 16x, hand-selected, high-quality recordable media from Verbatim (Taiyo Yuden) to run our tests at that speed. It worked well, but I wouldn’t put my life on its long-term durability.
INTERFACE
Other advances can be found on the interface side. More and more optical drives are now based on the convenient Serial ATA standard rather than UltraATA, which requires a jumper setting to put the drive into master or slave mode. SATA is faster but also much more common on modern motherboards.
An optical drive Drive (without case)
DISC LABELING TECHNOLOGIES
Lastly, many newer drives support disc labeling technologies, such as Labelflash or LightScribe. Unfortunately, these two aren’t compatible and require different media if you want to label them using the drive’s laser. Both technologies require compatible media, which you can turn over to have your DVD recording software burn images into the label side. This makes sense for important or valuable discs. But the technologies aren’t compatible, which means that you have to settle on one of them and purchase compatible media. Note that these discs typically aren’t available for top recording speeds.
CONCLUSIONS
DVD/CD burners are really cheap today, so I wouldn't spend much time to decide which drive to buy. I strongly recommend LG DVD/CD burners because of its reliability. For example, two models I would buy may be GH22NS (NO Lightscribe) or GH22LS30 (Lightscribe). If you will copy often CDs from one DVD/CD to another one (copy "on the fly"), I also recommend to buy two optical drives so as not to have to save a previous DVD/CD image in the Hard Disk.
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