DVR-118LBK: Last of the Pioneer PATA DVDRW Drives

[trag]

Not strictly speaking a conquest, but as PATA is phased out, these are going to get harder to find. And since the lasers in RW optical drives do tend to die eventually, there's something to be said for new ones.

Anyway, a bit of searching turned up the Pioneer DVR-118LBK for $30 at http://store.overstock-king.com/product_info.php?products_id=234. I think they were selling for around $50 at OWC when they still had stock.

I think Newegg still has stock of an LG or Samsung drive, but I'm partial to the Pioneers for no good reason.

 

[protocol7]

My DVR-111D is still running as smooth as when I bought it new. I've only bought 3 DVD drives for my main PC since 1999. They've all been Pioneer and all are still working. I just went from ROM to RW to DL-RW.

 

[Unknown_K]

The Samsung drive in my Quicksilver works like a charm (newegg N82E16827151175 $20.99 and still in stock). I liked it enough to get a Samsung SATA for my Dell (newegg N82E16827151192 out of stock).

Any particular reason you guys like Pionere other then it was a good brand back in the day? I used to love Lite-on in the early 2000's for CDRW drives since they lasted forever with massive use, but quality seems to have gone down a bit when we all switched to DVD burners a few years later.

The old SCSI CDR burners (and some later SCSI CDRW) seems to last forever, I have some old 6x and 8x Teac drives that ended up being used on my IIfx and other 68K macs because they will not quit working and I moved on to newer drives for my main machines ages ago. Yamaha also made some killer old drives back in the day, and then quit the market about the time DVDr came about.

 

[trag]

All my old Yamaha SCSI CDRW drives died. The old 426 and 4416, IIRC. It has made me anxious about dieing RW drives.

As I mentioned in my original post, I don't really have a rational reason for preferring the Pioneer drives. I've had good experiences with them so far, and Apple used them as their OEM drives in a lot of machines, so maybe that's why.

Whatever one's preference, now is probably the time to stock up on a couple of the latest, last models of PATA DVD-RW drives, if one is planning to keep old PCI machines around for a while. Obviously won't do much good on pre-pci machine, expect, perhaps the few (one?) that have an IDE bus. Although, I've thought about but never tested a SCSI-IDE adapter on a PATA DVD-RW drive. I'll have to give that a try some time.

 

[Unknown_K]

Who knows maybe the old drives were built better and will outlast the newer stuff. I should have half a dozen or more external SCSI CDR/RW drives that should still be working (you pick up a local lot and you tend to find one in it along with old modems).

The thing I worry about is media, companies changing the composition of the dye and reflective background so much that the old burners hav no idea what to make of it. I read a while back the original Pionere 1x DVDR drives had issues with newer media (and who would want to burn a DVD at 1x anyway)?

I have an IDE to 50 pin SCSI adapter made especially to fit behind a 5.25 drive that I used to test a DVD ROM drive in a 68K mac, maybe I will test it out someday on an IDE burner. The problem we will most likely face is the old burning software will not have a driver for the newer drive so even if the system sees the drive you are still out of luck burning with it.