DVD Drive Recommendation?

[HedsSpaz]

Ok, I've finally given up resisting the lure of a DVD drive and I'm going to get one. The question is, which to get? Right now I'm considering a Pioneer DVD-115 or a DVD-105S. The only difference between them as near as I can tell is that one is slot load and the other is tray.

What I want to know is, does anyone have any comments for or against these drives or a recommendation for another brand/drive?

Thanks a lot all!

(oh yeah, this is IDE obviously, much as I wish I could afford SCSI there is no chance of that right now)

Ian

[Guru]

Personaly I think Pioneer should have stayed in the car audi buisness! If I were you I would buy a Toshiba 12x drive!

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Join the MURC SETI team! | SETI @ MURC

[SteveC]

Pioneer's DVD drives are excellent drives! I can also recommend Toshiba, but would rather have a Pioneer slot drive.

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Himself]

I've had a Pioneer 104s for ages and never had a problem with it, the slot format is handy if you have several CD-ROM type devices, no tray to get in the way when moving CDs around.

[Wombat]

I do not believe that these two Pioneer companies are the same.

I have the 104, and it's very nice. I bought mine re-branded from http://www.hi-val.com

[Sisyfos]

The slot-loader version also has digital cd-out, if you're in to that sort of thing.

[DuRaNgO]

funny you should ask! I just picked up a Toshiba 12x this week

It runs very quiet, watched "Soldier" starring Kurt Russell last night through my g400 and it looked and sounded amazing! (this was on my tv)

It is region locked but that doesn't affect me

It cost me $140 brown box
jim

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P3-700e @ 1052! Check it here!
Abit BE6-2
TwinMos 256mb pc-133
G400 32mb DH
Maxtor 15.3gb 7,200rpm
SB Live!
Toshiba 12x DVD
Iomega 650cd burner
Winblows 98se & DX7
and 384k DSL!

[This message has been edited by DuRaNgO (edited 17 October 2000).]

[Paulr]

Pioneer, Pioneer, Pioneer, Pioneer......did I mention you should buy a Pioneer??
I own the 32x/6x SCSI slot loader, lovely bit of kit.
I'm considering upgrading to the 40x/16x SCSI slot loader for the digital output (something they didn't put on my model)
Once you own a slot-loader you'll never want to go back to the all too common 'tray'

[Wombat]

I'm going to kill them all, sir.

[DentyCracker]

Toshiba Toshiba Toshiba Toshiba Toshiba Toshiba Toshiba Toshiba can I say Toshiba
These DVDs read almost anything. Going to pick up one of those next month for $99 from www.mwave.com .
Call me old fashioned but I don't like slot loaded drives. The convenience factor may work for some though. I plan to put it in the 4th or 5th 5.25" slot on my Q500 case so it shouldn't be too close to the Plextor burner in the 1st slot

[DentyCracker]

Wombat it is the same Pioneer, excellent company I might add.
I decided to get the DVD when I played a movie at work in a large room on a 19" monitor and my system (pre SB Live XGamer 5.1 i.e. with SB Live XGamer). I realized I was not tapping the potential of the speakers as they sounded awesome. I got jealous and decided then and there that I just had to be watching DVDs at home on my system. BTW at 700 MHz the picture was awesome without decoder on the G400 (powerDVD 2.55)

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1° System
Inwin Q500 Case
Abit KT7 Motherboard
AMD Duron 700@850 MHz.
128 MB Micron PC100 Cas 2 PC100 SDRAM.
Maxtor 20 GB 5400 RPM UATA 66 HD
Quantum Fireball 4.3 GB UATA 33 HD
Plextor PX-W8432 burner
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1
Matrox G400 DH 32MB
Mag Innovision DX17T
Klipsch ProMedia v2.400 Speakers (yeah baby)
ATI TV Wonder*sigh*
Realtek 8039AS based 10Mbps NIC
Running Win98SE, Win2K SP1, BeOS 5.03 and Mandrake Linux 7.1(xfree 4.0)


2° System
Generic Finger Slicer AT Case
FIC VA503+
IBM Cyrix PR 266 *brrr* (long story)
128 MB Generic PC100 SDRAM
Maxtor 10 GB 7200 PRM UDMA33 HD
Creative Labs Ensonic AudioPCI64 (es1371)
Matrox Millennium G200 AGP
Realtek 8019 ISA NIC
Win98 2222A
Win2k Pro SP1

3° System

PCChips M571
Intel Pentium MMX 233
128 MB EDO DRAM (SIMMS)
IBM 10 GB HD
Diamond Stealth S3 trio 64
Realtek 8019 ISA NIC

[uberlad]

I'm going to also say PIONEER!!!! I just had a horrible experience with the toshiba SCSI 10X, I found it slow, incopmpatible with copy protection and it refused to play DVD's.

It was also region locked, and screwed up WinMil (although I admit that might have been me/M$ )

The pioneer however rocked serious bells, only got rid of it to go SCSI.

Paulr - I would be VERY interested in taking that off your hands should you decide to upgrade, my current seacrh for one is coming up with zip and I love that drive 8-)

Uberlad

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8 out of 10 women say they would feel no qualms about hitting a man.
5 out of 10 referred to me by name.

[Maggi]

I use a Pioneer S303 (SCSI), which was the latest built that is region free ...

Didn't have any probs and grabbing from Audio CDs is done in ~15-20x speed.

I recommend to have a look over here http://www.7thzone.com/, as this site offers all you wanna know and amongst other topics, that includes all pros & cons for hard- and software.

Cheers,
Maggi

[Gurm]

Now I'm going to contradict everyone in here, but:

Drives NOT to get:
- Panasonic

Drives I recommend if you intend to NOT have a CD-Rom also:
- Hitachi (quiet, fast, did I say quiet?)
- Toshiba (reads ALL copy protection with CloneCD when making copies)

Drives I recommend if you intend to have a separate CD-Rom:
- Pioneer

Gurm

P.S. Why can't you afford SCSI? A SCSI controller is $50 nowadays, and a SCSI DVD drive is no more expensive than an IDE, and can even be cheaper if you get last year's model (and let's be honest who cares about the difference between 32x and 40x max?)

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[This message has been edited by Gurm (edited 18 October 2000).]

[HedsSpaz]

Why can't you afford SCSI? A SCSI controller is $50 nowadays, and a SCSI DVD drive is no more expensive than an IDE, and can even be cheaper if you get last year's model (and let's be honest who cares about the difference between 32x and 40x max?)

Gurm I would agree with you completely that the difference 'tween 32x and 40x makes very little practicle difference. The real concern for me is the SCSI controller. Someday I hope to go be able to go all out and go SCSI all the way, but if I get a SCSI controller now, I don't want to skimp on a 50$ controller. I want to get an Adaptec 29160 controller, which is significantly more than 50$. The other peice of this is that while 50$ may not be the "straw that broke the camels back", it may be the straw that makes it so that Ian can't uprade to a Dual CPU Athlon later this year, and we wouldn't want that now would we.

Denty, Mwave is a great store. Thats where I buy most of my stuff and where I was planning on buying from this time as well.

I also have to admit that the 'slot-load' is rather enticing just for the fun of it.

So, I do plan on keeping my CDROM drive in my system as well, the primary purpose of getting this drive is so that I can start building an anime DVD collection and actually have someplace to watch them.

So, I think the general consensus here is to get a Pioneer drive if the primary use is DVD's and not CD's. So, I do believe that I'll be ordering the Pioneer DVD-105S.

As for region locking, well, lets just say that I've already done some research and found some rather, er, 'useful' sites with interesting bits of rom code and other clever pieces of software.

Ian