DVD burner recommendations

Carole, we just bought a DL 16X (tho I never burn at that speed) NEC. I'm at home now so I don't recall the exact model number but so far, have had 20 or 30 burns with no probs.

Needed Patchburn to get my partner's G4 to recognize it, but other than that, works fine.

Way back in my bad old PC days we had a Panasonic that I was kind of lukewarm about; a few probs but that was a few years ago .. and it was a PC so what can you do?

Hello Carole,

I own a LaCie d2 +/-RW (SL) burner that I'm really happy with.

.... oh yeah, it also works perfectly well with my Toshiba laptop 🙂

mish

mish,

Did you need Patchburn? Did you use the software driver that came with the LaCie? Or does it just work with 10.3.9?

My three-year-old LaCie just works with Tiger. Don't recall what I had to do under Panther. I know I never installed their software, but I did have Patchburn at one time.

Len,

I tried Patchburn when I bought the burner (litle more than two years ago), but the reason was iDVD 4 not supporting ext. burners (other than that I didn't need a driver).
In any case HPfurz solved the issue .... Patchburn never really worked for me. After a couple of weeks I got Toast and ever since have burned my img's with that.

mish

Would you guys mind posting the model numbers

I've been happy with LaCie products over the years. Might look here:

http://www.lacie.com/products/range.htm?id=10014

Hello Carole,

posting my exact model won't get you very far, as the model is probably not longer available as such .... this means if you do see a LaCie d2 burner it will be a newer model - LaCie seems to name them all alike.

Also: LaCie is not a manufacturer of burners, but an assembler. My burner houses a NEC 2500-A, others have Pioneer ingredients I think. You have to dig real deep to find the "real" specs.

Most of the burners on the site you mentioned are USB 2, which I wouldnt recommend. The most interesting is the gray Sony - IMHO.

Add-on: Just went to the LaCie website and it seems that all their new burners are Lightscribe (a labeling method) - so if you don't need that you're spending money for nothing.

Maybe this is helpful:
http://external-dvd-burner-review.toptenreviews.com/

hope this helps

mish

Hello Carole,

Firewire is nominally slower than USB (400 MB/sec vs. 480 MB/sec) but in reality these maximum data rates are not often reached - I have both USB and Firewire hard drives and can't see a difference in data transfer.

In my personal experience Firewire offers better connectivity on the Mac without the need of drivers. Also, if the burner - as I suspect - comes with two FW ports, it allows daisy chaining with an ext. hard drive for example.

As for lightscribe, I personally prefer printable DVD media (less pricy) but obviously you need a particular printer for that. Etching the DVDs also takes a while. If you want a simple all-in-one solution, lightscribe might be the ideal thing for you.

hope this helps

mish

Carole,

you're welcome .... have fun burning 🙂

mish

Hi Carole Martin

I own three Pioneer S-Drives (2 internal and 1 external 110D which is housed in an ADS FW enclosure). I highly recommend this particular brand over others already mentioned above /mainly because Pioneer is also the stock drive apple uses in my own mac system/s.

That and they also have the added advantage of burning reliably to dual layer DVD-R (minus) media as well as plus media. I believe minus media is better suited for video playback than most plus medias in terms of reliable and consistent video playback. The only time I personally use "Plus"+ media is for data DVD's and not for video playback (altho it is possible to use both). Highly recommend using Minus media like Verbatim DVD-R (or DL DVD-R) if your intention is higher quality video playback.

Hope this added suggestion proves helpful.

SDMacuser

unless someone can tell me why I shouldn't, and should go for a different one.

If you don't have Toast, I'd buy this one:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10113

It's $70 more, but includes Toast Titanium 7, which I use a lot for things other than burning iDVD disk images. And Toast comes with a pretty slick piece of software called Motion Pictures HD. Also has some labeling software too.