Blu-Ray drive recommendations?

[micks_address]

Hi folks - thinking of putting a blu-ray drive in my dell studio pc.. what are the cheapest options to for? is there much of a price differential between read and read/write drives?

cheers,
mick

[McBain]

Read only: Lite-ON iHOS104 (around $60 US)
Write/read: Pioneer BDR-203 (around $225 US)

[eric.groves]

Mick

I agree with McBain. I am using the same two that he recommends and am very pleased with both.

Eric

[gvortex7]

I've been using Sony's BDU-X10S for over 4 months now, and I have nothing but good things to say about it. It's a very solid drive. I got it at CompUSA for $99.99, but you can probably get it for a little less on Ebay or elsewhere. I personally don't trust LiteON drives, so I wouldn't recommend them, but my experience with them comes from using some of their DVD drives. I haven't tried any of their BD drives, yet.

[crackinhedz]

Ive got an LG BD/HD DVD burner, plays every single disc and have had zero issues. Price was about $170

[DrasticPlastic]

I too have the LG GGW-H20L and thus far it has been awesome.

[hoju3508]

So far, my LG GGW-H20L has been good to me as well.

[MADNOD]

hi using the Lite-ON 401 and very happy with it, and it's been more than a year, see my collection, none of them causes a problem.

[crackinhedz]

Originally Posted by DrasticPlastic

I too have the LG GGW-H20L and thus far it has been awesome.

yup, that's the one I have.

[McBain]

The GGW-H20L was replaced by the BH08LS20/WH08LS20.

[CdnBlu]

I'm running the LG BH-08, has been working good so far

[saljr]

Plextor Px-b320sa

[Blacklac]

LG combo for me, been perfect.

[Jello]

I have the LG BH08LS20 - no issues so far

[megapixel]

Plextor PX-B920SA

http://www.plextor-europe.com/produc...px-b920sa.html

[bdsoft]

Pioneer Blu ray Drive

or


LG Blu ray Drive

[Jimbo976]

I just picked up the Pioneer BDR-203BK for my desktop pc. I have not installed it yet but the specs at least look a lot better than the Blu-ray writer in my Dell XPS M1530. It works ok but it's very slow. The Pioneer advertises 8x read and write on BD-R so that should make it a lot more usable for my than the one in my laptop.

I'm not sure if it's been posted here or not but here is a very detailed review of the Pioneer BDR-203..

http://www.cdfreaks.com/review/15764...burner-review/

[Jimbo976]

I installed the BDR-203BK last night in my desktop pc and am very happy with it. I did have some minor issues setting it up though. My 1st issue was moving SATA connections around as this drive is SATA only and my board (Asus P5K) only supports 4 SATA devices on the main board and then has a different controller with 2 more ports that can be used for RAID. I'm not using RAID but I wasn't able to get all 6 ports to work at the same time so for now I had to unplug one of my SATA HD's.

Once I got it all connected, I was not getting all the advertised speeds as shown in that review I posted but after a while I figure out that it was due to the SPTD driver which is needed by the daemon tools program. Once I removed Daemon tools and SPTD (have to do it separately) then I was able to get the correct speeds. My previous DVD writer is actually a Pioneer as well but one that did not support DL DVD burning and also did not support DVD-RAM. The BDR-203 supports all of these and it seems to have pretty good performance for DVD burning as well.

I burned a Verbatim BD-RE @2X and a Verbatim BD-R @2x(since the only media I have now is 2x) and all went fine. The discs seem to work fine. Once I work through my current media I'll have to pick up some 4x BD-R.

The Panasonic UJ-225 Blu-ray writer in my Dell M1530 laptop has worked great for playing movies but it's so slow for anything else. I had pretty much given up on using BD-R with it since it takes so long to burn or read Blu-rays. It is only 1.6x (with dual layer) or 2x (single layer) for reading and burning. The BDR-203 has rekindled my interest in using BD-R and BR-RE.

I was taking a hard look at the Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater 7.1 sound card in the case at the store beside the writer. I was able to hold myself back but I suspect i'll be picking one up at some point. It was $260 Cdn I believe.