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Introduction

Even though DVD burner prices have been constantly falling, especially in the last year, a lot of people still cannot justify the purchase of a DVD burner. While a lot of people burn CDs for the car, how many cars can play DVD-audio? On the other hand, if you actually have a DVD audio system in your car, you probably shouldn't even be considering the $30 difference between a combo drive and a DVD burner. (Yes I know this is not the only thing DVDs are used for, but it illustrates the common person's lack of need in DVD burning)

When thinking about what optical drive to buy, there are a few things you need to consider. Primarily, who is going to use it and what is it going to be used for? If you ever thought that you would like to backup games or movies at some point in your life, perhaps you should get a DVD burner and not a combo drive. However, for family and friends, I wonder if they even considered something like (il)legal backups to be possible. For example, take my sister. As long as she can burn mix CDs and watch movies on her computer, she's happy. I'm sure everybody knows someone like that.

The drive

It's an optical drive. There's really not much to talk about. The package itself is pretty plain, coming with no optical media (which is disappointing), no alternate color bezels (unfortunate), hoowever it does come with screws (as it should) and Nero 6 (a very good package, probably best software you could include). CD's are cheap, so why am I complaining about no optical media? While I agree that CD-Rs are cheap and readily available up to 52x, I’ll be damned if I can find a 32x CD-RW in Canada, local or online. Even though most CDRW/combo drives support 32x CD-RWs, the availability of RWs past 24x are mediocre at best, rare as a X800 XT PE AGP at worst.

Regardless of the package, the first thing you notice is that the drive is really short. If any of you have read my reviews on the Soltek Qbics, you would know that the PSU is located right behind the optical drive and causes problems with long drives. In this case, there are absolutely no installation issues for any case, including all SFFs - so all you SFF PC fan's out there might be interested in this drive.