Best Burners, What brand is the best Options

[brown274]

I have had a sony dru-700a (ide) for 2 years now and it has never made a coaster. Well after about 2000 disc later I need another drive. So I bought a asus drw-2014l1t, it will rip, but it won't write on verbatium, philips, or imation media. So then I bought a lite-on lh-20alt (sata) and the same thing happens to it, but I can't hardly play dvd's since it won't read new disc, or burn anything. I flashed firmware and still the same problem. I think I will just buy a sony dru-840a and call it done.
What do you consider as the best company?

[dreamliner77]

I have had a sony dru-700a (ide) for 2 years now and it has never made a coaster. Well after about 2000 disc later I need another drive. So I bought a asus drw-2014l1t, it will rip, but it won't write on verbatium, philips, or imation media. So then I bought a lite-on lh-20alt (sata) and the same thing happens to it, but I can't hardly play dvd's since it won't read new disc, or burn anything. I flashed firmware and still the same problem. I think I will just buy a sony dru-840a and call it done.
What do you consider as the best company?

If you want a SATA drive, get a Samsung 203B or 203N. For IDE, I'd say got for a Pioneer.

[CiTay]

Funny, the Lite-On LH-21A1L was just regarded as the best drive in the burner roundup of c't magazine, 3/08. Maybe that's a different model than yours after all. The Samsung had good DVD-R burn quality, but horrible CD-R burn quality at 40x speed, so you'd need to limit it to 24x or 16x.

The same can be said for DVD burning: Reduce the speed to 8x and you avoid many problems.

[LordWarlock]

That sounds more like a driver/hardware problem those drives are normaly burning just fine. If using SATA optical drives, it is recommended to use the Microsoft driver for SATA controler and if you have an intel board, don't use AHCI.