cd-rom drives

I was looking for a way to back up my DVDs here in the harsh desert environment of Kuwait, and I needed a reliable DVD burner to do it. I knew I wouldn't be able to call up tech support or customer service and wait half an hour to talk to a technician, so I did the research and paid extra for the Plextor, and I'm glad I did. After 4 months it has performed just advertised with no glitches. Installation was easy, no additional drivers neccessary for my Dell 1100 laptop. I have burned several "coasters" (bad disks), but have since determined that the problem was that the disks themselves were at fault and not the burner. An added plus is that the "full" version of Roxio Easy CD/DVD creator is included, which includes features like cross fading. Overall an excellent and rugged product and worth the money. Minor gripe with Amazon in that they won't ship this to an APO address, but otherwise a very good deal.

- No installation: simply plug into a USB port
- Simple operation: fool-proof
- Included software is just so-so, useable but very limited. You may need to buy a DVD copy/create software so that you can compress more data into a standard 4.7 GB DVD blank or skip bad sectors if needed.

- This burner favors DVD+R (8X write) over DVD-R (4X) so buy your media accordingly.
- It will take 15-18 minutes to fill a DVD-R (2hrs of video) at 4X speed and about 8-10 minutes for DVD+R. I had burned roughly 100 DVDs so far and the write time has been very consistent. (Data caching/creation is an entirely different story as it varies greatly depending on data types, compression needs and machine CPU speed.)

Just don't see how the previous reviewer created a two-hours home movies DVD in 4 minutes??? That would be 20 MB/sec or 14X write speed. Wow!

This is product is TOTALLY AWESOME!
I Burned my 2 hour home movie in less than 4 minutes!!!!
Perfect quality exactly like the original!!
Well worth the $$$
I HIGHLY Reccomend this product !!!!!!