Well I have a dell 8250 and despite the fact that it's borderline ancient I don't have any problems burning. I have a lot of older backups on real crappy media and I want to salvage as many of them as I can before the crc errors start to pop up. I only use verbatim now and lately I can only find ones made in India. I'm considering trying to find some taiyo yudens or otherwise media made in Japan. My main concern is that my drives won't be able to read/burn different types of media due to a lack of firmware updates for 2 to 3 years. My current drives are: LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163 _NEC DVD+RW ND-1100A I can only burn a 2.4x and I've been told that that’s a generic burn speed? I know these drives will crap out eventually but for now they're still going strong. I would rather wait until I build a new pc to get new drives instead of blowing $100 on drives for my dell which would probably cause conflicts anyways. I guess my main questions are: 1. If I can burn verbatims granted slowly but just fine, shouldn't taiyo yudens perform the same? 2. My pc has a 2.66 GHz p4, and 512 ram so I'm not even sure if it could handle the speeds/transfer rates of newer faster drives.
Hi redux79 I think your NEC should do fine w/ the Taiyo's - 8x only. They can still be found online at supermediastore.com or rima.com. Th 2.4x is a generic write speed - it the speed a burner will use if the media is not supported in the firmware. I think your pc specs are fine for new drives - you're good there.
Thanks binkie I was hoping for some advice before I bought media incompatible with my drives. Have you had any experience with supermediastore.com? I've never ordered media online before and I've heard of a number of shipping horror stories (broken spindles and cracked cases). Also are they based/have shipping facilities in the US? I've read nothing but good reviews about them and taiyo yudens; I'm just a little concerned about giving out personal information to a site I've never used before. I’m looking into these: http://www.supermediastore.com/taiyo-yuden-silver-thermal-8x-dvd-plus-r-media-100.html Does thermal refer to a specific process in making the disc? Or is it just a gimmick?
Not a problem redux79 The Taiyo Yuden 8x is pretty well supported w/ most drives and the NEC should do fine w/ it. It's an older drive so yeah at some point soon I would get a new one. Newegg.com has LiteOn & Pioneers for around $35-40. Yes I've used supermediastore and rima for probably close to 4 years now. Just got orders from both in the past week. No problems at all - they packaged the goods pretty well. They are based in California and to get to me they have to go all the way across country. All is in 1 piece I can certainly understand being leery - I am too. But w/ these 2 sites you're good - a lot of members here us them. The thermal just means that if you had a thermal printer you could print on them. I use both the thermal (no thermal printer here just a sharpie ) and the inkjet printable ones.
I've never heard of a thermal printer before, I thought the only options were either lightscribe or inkjet interesting. I'm on the other side of the country as well. Looks to be around 5 day shipping (just found the estimated arrival time map), that’s pretty good for ground and it's free. I think I'm going to need new drives anyway after all the Nero quality tests and burns Thanks again binkie
You're welcome redux79 Yeah thermal printers are quite expensive I think. Plus the little I've looked up on them it's more like lightscribe - not all the colors like an inkjet printer. I'll stick w/ my inkjet
