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Pioneer DVD 116
by shuttlex
Recently I purchased this Pioneer DVD 116 drive as an upgrade to my previous NEC DVD burner. In the early days of DVD burners, drives used to cost in excess of £100, however gradually prices have become lower and lower. The reason I chose to upgrade to this Pioneer drive is its reliability for burning dual layer DVDR discs. While most ... burners are supposedly able to perform this operation from the specs, in reality many fail, especially for burning cheaper dual layer discs made by AONE.
Most of today's DVD burners can burn a dual discs manufactured by Verbatim however Verbatim discs are expensive, at least double of that of AONE discs. This drive allows one to make a perfect 1:1 copy of a dual layer DVD for playback in a DVD player without the need to compress the movie to fit on a single layer disc.
I purchased the OEM version of this drive for approx £17 from play.com. The OEM drive comes without any packaging or cables, simply a sheet of instructions. Installing this drive is like installing any other IDE drive, simply connect one end of the IDE cable to the motherboard and the other end to the drive and connect the power cable. I'm using this drive with Windows 7, no drivers need to be installed, Windows automatically detects the hardware.
I've been using a piece of software called imgburn to burn discs with this drive. Imgburn is reliable and most importantly one can download it for free. Using a combination of imgburn and the Pioneer DVD116 I haven't come across any problems. The drive does what it is meant for, burning DVDR's and most importantly dual layer DVDR's. Lately there have been many complaints regarding incompatibility issues with most DVDR drives and dual layer discs. However, unlike other drives, the Pioneer 116 avoids all these problems.
The build quality of the drive is also reasonable and at only £17 from Play.com, this drive is extremely good value for money.
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LG GCR 8523B
by seth1970
Whizz, bang wallop. My CD burner has die. Probrably due to the fact that I am transferring loads of my old albums videos to CD, and it has been going non-stop for the past 2 weeks!
My last CD burner was an LG, and I was more than happy with what it produced. That one cost me £49.99 a couple of years ago, so I was expecting ... to pay around £30 this time.
I popped into Aria in Levenshulme, and they had some LG burners in the bargain bin. The LG GCE 8523B was in there and caught my eye immediately. The price also shocked me-£4.99!!! I grabbed it, and ran home.
The box contained the drive, am installation cd, cables, and a copy of Nero Smartsuite, that was not advertised on the box. Result!!! This is one of the best bits of software for CD Burners ever made!!!
It is a standard size for this kind of drive, measuring in at 14.6 cm wide, 18.5 cm deep and 4.1 cm tall. The fascia is the usual off-white color that these things seem to come in, and has an eject button, volume wheel, headphone socket and drive light. Nothing new here, but that's not a problem. It claims to be Burnproof (i.e., will not make coasters), and I am please to say, up to now it has lived up to this.
Installing the drive was a bit fiddly, but this is not LG's fault, more the fault of me trying to get as much in a case as possible!!
Windows XP took care of the software installation (Once again, I love XP!!), and I installed Nero.
I first burnt a 70 minute VCD on it at max speed (52x). It took 2 minutes 15 seconds, and it played perfectly. I also burnt an audio disk, and MP3 disc, and a disk of software all at top speed, and all without any problems.
The open/close function is nice and smooth, and the drive it'self was almost silent. These things don't often make much noise anyway, but this one is even better!
The Nero Smartsuite you get with it is an amazing program. The wizards that pop up are extremely useful, and are great for beginners and experts alike.
It does what it says on the box very well, and is highly recommended.
I previously published this review on Ciao under the name sethsurvey. As far as I am aware, I can re-publish it here, but if anyone knows any different, please let me know
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Sony MPF 920
by ben-lloyd
~~~ Overview & Appearance ~~~
The MPF920 is a fairly unremarkable floppy disk drive produced by Sony to be mounted inside your trusty computer. The drive supports 3.5" diskettes up to a maximum capacity of 1.44MB. Measuring just over 3.5" x 4.5" x 1" (approx) the main body of the unit is composed of ... steel, with a beige fascia at the front. There is a small slot for inserting your diskette, a button to eject the diskette and a small green LED to indicate whether the drive is being read from or written to by your computer. The rear of the unit features a small 4-pin power connector and also a second set of smaller pins for connecting the drive to your motherboard by means of the supplied (sometimes!) lead. The drive features a selection of small holes along each side so that you can screw it securely into your PC case.
Interestingly(?!) the drive is fully enclosed in the steel casing so that there is no exposed circuit board on the underside of the drive which is common in devices from other manufacturers. By hiding this circuitry, Sony have reduced the risks of damaging the drive if you accidentally place something made of metal against the circuit board.
~~~ Use ~~~
Once the drive has been fitted into your PC, it should immediately be recognised by your variant of Windows (Apple Macintosh ended their support of floppy disks years ago) and show up as another drive in "My Computer". Insert a diskette and you can read from or write to the disk as you would any other disk-drive-type device attached to your computer.
Being a floppy disk drive, the MPF9020 is nothing special. Floppy disk drives have become virtually obsolete so there is no longer any incentive for the computing industry to increase the read/write speed of the drive.
Similarly, this drive only accepts 1.44 MB floppy diskettes which in todays terms is a tiny amount of information. Considering many digital cameras take photographs of 2.5MB+ in size, you are not going to able to fit many (if any) onto a diskette.
~~~ Observations ~~~
In the course of my job, I have found the Sony MPF920 to be an extremely resilient piece of hardware. Working in a school I am very used to finding all manner of objects inserted into the floppy disk drives, but I have found that the Sony drives seem to withstand this treatment far more readily than any of their rivals.
Added to this is the relative ease with which the drive casing can be removed so that inserted objects can be retrieved, this drive really is worth investigating for use in enviroments where you may experience regular computer vandalism.
Sadly te small springs which keep the floppy drive doors are not quite as sturdy as the rest of the device and they do occasionally fall off meaning that the floppy door must be removed. This does not appear to affect the functioning of the drive in any way though.
~~~ Conclusion ~~~
As noted above, the relatively small capacity of floppy disks means that they are all but obsolete in modern computers. That said, the floppy disk is still the most widely-used form of removable computer storage and will probably be with us for some time to come (until the World stops using Windows 95/98 anyway!).
Floppy disk drives are notoriously fragile because of the way they use magnetic fields to store data on floppy disks and as such, there is always a few delicate points inside the drive. With this device, Sony have done as much as possible to prevent damage to its componentry and in my experience this really is one of the best designed units around. And you must remember not to expose your floppy disks to magnets or mobile phones!
If you are in the market for a new floppy disk drive, (perhaps your brand new PC did not come with one), or you need to replace an old drive, then this drive will meet your requirements perfectly.
Thanks for reading!
© 2009 ben-lloyd. Please note that this review appears on other webistes under the same username.
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