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.