[vox-tech] CD Burner Recomendation?

[Jan W]

I have put alot of different DVD and CD burners through their paces
with linux here at my work.

Plextor CD/DVD drives are a bit pricier, and the highest quality that I
have seen.  Usually the plextor drives we have here survive longer than
the motherboards and power supplies of the boxes they are in.  But most
drives that I have played around with work well enough.

Sony drives work very well, also.  Lite-On also works very well.  In
the "bad old days", it was a crapshoot if the burners would work with
linux.  Now, since so much work went into cdrecord surrounding the
ATAPI interface (no more ide-scsi), burners are more likely to work
than not.

My recommendation is that if you're burning 1000s of cd's (like we do
here at work), buy a plextor.  If your usage is a bit more casual, just
about any drive should work fine for you.  

If you're worried that a drive won't work, try bringing a knoppix disc
to the store you're thinking of buying from, boot a floor model from
knoppix and do a 'cdrecord -scanbus'.  If the drive shows up, most
likely it will work with any distro you choose.

Oh, and btw, I would suggest using 'growisofs' over 'cdrecord' for
burning DVD's.

Here is a little crappy script that I use to burn DVD isos:

<begin>

#!/bin/bash

if [ -f "$1" ] ; then
        /usr/bin/growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/hdc=$1
        eject
        read -p "- hit enter when ready -"
        eject -t
else
        echo "usage: burndvd [isofile]"
fi

<end>

Just make sure that if your DVD drive isn't /dev/hdc, change that part
of the script to reflect the real device name of your drive.  

Burning CD's with linux is so much more reliable than everything else I
have tried.  With windows (this was almost 7 years ago with a ancient
version of Roxio), we were getting about a 20% failure rate.  With
linux (and the same hardware), we get under 1% failure rate.  Although
my experience with windows cd burning has improved, it's nowhere near
the reliability of growisofs/mkisofs/cdrecord.

Best of luck and I hope that helps out!

--jan


--- Ryan <cjg5ehir02 at sneakemail.com> wrote:

> On Saturday 22 July 2006 01:39 pm, Bob Scofield
> scofield-at-omsoft.com 
> |lugod| wrote:
> > I need a new CD burner.  In the past a lot of folks have
> recommended
> > Plextor for Linux.  That's what I have now.  Do people still think
> Plextor
> > is a good recommendation for a Linux machine?
> 
> Plextor drives are VERY nice.  I've got a plextor DVD burner, and
> i've never 
> had any problems with it.  I've also had very good luck with Lite-On
> drives.  
> Lite-On drives are probably the best value.
> 
> -- 
> Ryan Castellucci - http://ryanc.org/
> GPG Key: http://ryanc.org/files/publickey.asc
> _______________________________________________
> vox-tech mailing list
> vox-tech at lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
> 


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