Considering a DVD burner

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 02:38:27PM -0400, Tom Watts wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience with this NEC drive under Linux:
> 
> http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2271184&sku=N27-1892
> 
> I'm considering it, but don't want to buy it if it isn't going to work 
> under Linux.

It should work fine.  I haven't seen any optical drive that didn't work
with linux in a long time.

Now by work I mean, you can read and write disks.  If you want it fully
supported, plextor is the only choice.  The one missing feature is
firmware updating, which plextors can do under linux, while every other
brand (as far as I know) required windows, or dos if you are lucky, to
update the firmware on the drive.  The reasons to update firmware on a
DVD writer is generally to add support for new types of disks, which
does happen fairly frequently, although not as often as it used to.

So if you have windows for dual boot, then no worry.  If not, then you
can either just decide to never update the firmware, or move the drive
to a windows machine to update it every 6 months or so, whenever new
firmware is released.  Or you can pay 3 times as much and get the
plextor (3 times $40 still isn't that insane).

My personal machines all run plextor drives.  So far I have only seen
one plextor die, and my father used it as a CD player many hours a day
while working for 6 years before it died.  Seems the 12x drives probably
spun a little too fast given they hadn't add the double suspension
system yet to dampen vibrations, and audio CDs are often rather uneven.

--
Len Sorensen
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