Hi,

Unfortunately my old NEC NR-9200A finally died on me so i am in the look out for a new drive.

How fast the drive is doesnt really matter to me. Wide media support, many features (future proof) and last but not least, exelent writes/reads is what conserns me the most.

Ive always wanted a plextor but their 716SA runs at about $120-150 and considering the competition i would be cheating myself by getting anything other then a 16x if i was to go for the plextor's 12x version to save some money, so i guess thats not an option.

I am also looking at the BenQ 1620 and the NEC 3520.

From reading reviews it appears that the BenQ does exelent reads and writes. . . The guys at CDRinfo.com seem to be going nuts about this drive whereas the NEC only appears to be fast.

Does anyone own any of those drives that can also recomend or has the time finally come for me to own a SATA Plextor



Thanks

I'd be interested in hearing if there are actually any real advantages of SATA other than the fact that it's Serial ATA, uses smaller cables, has no jumper configuration, etc.

I've actually heard that SATA can be more CPU intensive than PATA, at least for hard drives. I'd love to have a drive that I could rip bad audio CDs with, and still playback music without skipping (on my NForce2 motherboard, which has issues with IDE bus usage and simultaneous sound playback).

This drive seems to review well. Personally, I've got the BenQ 1620A, but I've hardly ever burned DVDs with it (yet). I did one onto some cheap media, and it worked, but that's all I can say. I'll be archiving some of my lossless rips onto DVD soon, so maybe I will do some scans.

I had a problem with my BenQ 1620A, however, when I was ripping gazillions of CDs with EAC with it. Every now and then, when I went to rip to cuesheet and image, the drive would kind of "lock up" the computer for a few minutes, then say that detection mode is not available for this drive, or some such thing. It was a huge pain, because I basically had to reboot my computer.

When I look at drives, ripping scratched CDs well is a big priority for me. The BenQ has no C2 error correction (CDRINfo claims that the Plextor doesn't either, which I really wonder about), and I don't believe it caches audio data. The BenQ 1620 is thus quite fast at reading the scratched discs compared to some drives. (But on the other hand, plextools is quite good at this too, except Plextools pro XL requires another $60 investment in itself, and aside from it's error correction capabilities, isn't too great for CD Ripping, in my opinion.)

Hope some of this info helps!

Well all I can say is that from going PATA to SATA, I've only had one REAL Gripe which in my opinion is a design flaw. The actual connecting the HDD was easy just attach it and play, but whilst i was installing my GFX card [which is HUGE] I had to ease the gfx card at an angle to get it in then insert it in the agp slot, whilst doing so i accidently brushed past the SATA connector and managed to break the plug where the wire plugs into. being as I brought a Western Digital Raptor this could have been a very expensive mistake had i not solved the broken plug issue by easing the cable back on with the bare metal data cable back on to the plastic. If I havent explained myself well, i'll be happy to take some photos for you to show you how i broke this [Far too easy to break really].

As for the speed issue I'm very pleased with buying my pair of raptors, I don't need to put them in raid to get a REALLY fast boot up and load time with them.

Thanks for the reply Supacon, it is helpfull indeed.

I think ill go for the BenQ, the plextor is over my budget anyway . As for the SATA, as far as i know there isnt any advantages other then convinience (no jumpers etc), but still, it would be nice to get rid of that big ATA cable IMO.



I really doubt ill have the same issues since theres plenty of clearance between my AGP and SATA.

Also, we are talking about CD/DVD drives not Hard Drives. Thanks for the input though.

Did you consider LG GSA-4163B? It supports any CD & DVD media (including DVD-RAM). Since almost a year I have GSA-4120B which is a bit slower, but from the same breed, I wrote quite a lot of all kinds of discs with it and there's practically no problems.

I have the Pioneer DVR-108 and it's been working great for me. It's only $10 more then the NEC on average. Does everything out there, except for 6x DL (which the Plextor can).

It's been giving me decent DAE in EAC in secure mode. Up to 10x I see at times, but usually in the 6-8x range.

Burned a ton of DVD-R at 8x so far, flawless. Havn't tried DL stuff yet.

This is often a symptom of copy protected drives.

Although I would be quite surprised if the BenQ couldn't deal with these.
My Lite-On 832S can, no problems.
It is a very good drive, with great C2 error correction. It's only drawback is that it caches audio, so it has to be run in burst mode and Test and Copy in EAC to get it gong fast. Copies this way are completely secure, although extra precautions have to be taken.

Copy protected discs, you mean?

These are definitely *not* copy protected discs. Maybe there is something peculiar about them, but I ripped a series of almost 300, and they went as far back as 1993. I don't believe copy protection was even a glint in the recording industry's eye at that time

Indeed.
Sorry.

You are right. Back in 1993 the Music Industry did not even think about CD burning becoming mainstream (that's maybe the reason why Red Book Audio has no DRM built in)

Yours is a strange problem.
How did you manage to rip those CDs?
Maybe they are damaged (physically).
Could be a possibility, if they are that old.
But, when taken good care of, it should not happen.
My oldest CD is from 1989 and it rips flawlessly (not that I listen to that music anymore)

Hey, what's wrong with music from 1989? I just bought a whole bunch of CDs from that era

Most of those CDs are damaged physically, but that's not what is causing this. I thought it was basically EAC not getting along with the drive. The damage just makes extraction slow. All other drives work fine, except for my old Plextor 12/10/32A which won't read many of the discs period, but that's a whole other story. It works good most of the time, but that.drive is very old anyways.

It is a well-known fact that EAC is not fully supportive yet of that drive. There has been an update promised to be coming soon, but still no word yet. We'll just have to wait.

There is nothing wrong with music from 1989. But the music I listened back then... that is just plain wrong. My taste has evolved very much since, I hope.

You mean an update to EAC?? Wow, that has been a long time coming. I hope that Andre adds in the ability to paste lists of info into the Title fields... if he does, that will save me a lot of time, because I can paste the artists/titles in from a textfile or spreadsheet.