LG's "8240B" CDRW drive

[i]

I have a friend way up north (Manitoba, Canada) who's just asked me out of the blue if the CDRW drive she wants to get is a good choice or not. My luck with optical drives has been awful lately, so I'm hoping for opinions:

It's an LG 24x10x40 CDRW, specifically the GCE-8240B

http://www.lgeus.com/Product/CD/GCE_8240b.asp

Anyone had any experience (good or bad) with this thing? She's found somewhere reasonably local that sells it for about $170 Canadian ... which is about $110 US, or about $200 Australian.

 

[i]

Well it seems the price isn't that great.

Then again, if she had to have an alternative drive delivered by a group of nomadic reindeer herders, perhaps this one's not so bad.

I still don't know about performance though. I checked StorageReview's product review list and I didn't see any LG optical drives at all. Anyone know of a semi-decent optical drive review source?

 

[timwhit]

I stopped buying expensive burners after I had several of them break. I paid less than $70 US for my 32x12x48 Cyberdrive and it has worked fine for the 400 or so CDs I have made on it. You can get this drive for $53 from Newegg now.

Performance is fine also. Does anyone actually use a CD-ROM enough that performance really matters?

For reviews try: CD-R Labs or CD-R Info.

My previous burner was a 16x Sanyo SCSI. I burned over 2500 discs with it and it still worked when I sold it. So there is something to be said for Sanyo burners. I also had a Plextor 8x20 SCSI which got burned out after less than 500 Discs. The Panasonic 8x20 SCSI drive died pretty quickly too, less than 100 discs.

This is why I stopped spending $200 for a burner, I don't like spending a fortune when I have to replace them once a year. So from now on, I am going to buy cheap burners so that if they break I won't care.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

CDRLabs seems to like the LG burners.
Be sure to read their reviews though as I think one older model had some sort of problem.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Oh and the price is quite high considering I could have gotten the LG 32x model at $59.99 after rebates from best buy a week or two ago. American dollars that is.

 

[i]

Thanks Will! That CD-R Labs site is very informative.

 

[timwhit]

\For reviews try: CD-R Labs or CD-R Info.

Cough..Cough.....didn't you read my post???

 

[i]

Sorry timwhit! Wow ... I really need to snap out of whatever cloud I'm in. I honestly thought that post was by Will. But thanks to Will anyway for his follow-up posts.

Ignoring the LG drive for now, anyone have a favorite suggestion for an IDE CD-RW drive?

 

[timwhit]

As long as you are sorry in your heart, I will forgive you. But, only this once.

Cyberdrive 32x12x48

That's the drive I have, only costs $53. It's fast, not too loud, has good compatibility with a variety of media, and best of all it's real cheap.

I put a Lite-On 32x burner in a friend's computer a few weeks ago and it seemed much pickier with media than the Cyberdrive burner.

The Lite-On burners get good reviews, but I don't really like them that much. Like I said in my previous post, as long as it works there is no point in spending much on a burner because it will inevitabely break if you use it enough.

 

[Jake the Dog]

Sorry timwhit! Wow ... I really need to snap out of whatever cloud I'm in. I honestly thought that post was by Will. But thanks to Will anyway for his follow-up posts.

Ignoring the LG drive for now, anyone have a favorite suggestion for an IDE CD-RW drive?

i would have said the LG 24x10x40, which is the drive i have and like a lot but you're ignoring that now...


btw, it's a good drive, reliable, fast, good access time, great ripper, 8mb cache with buffer u/run, quiet too.

 

[The JoJo]

I've used the LG units in some computers I've built lately, and they seem like good drives.

Come to think of it, I don't use any other cd-rw brands right now.

 

[Sol]

I like the Lite-On's they don't seem to make any coasters and they burn anything.

I havn't seen any issues with different media but thats not to say there aren't any. I pretty much always just use the cheepest disks I can get and they've always worked fine.
The Lite-On burners have come down in price over here to so they're only about $100AU at swapmeets and such.

Also I don't think there is much point going more than 24x. We have about 5 burners on our local network and they are all Lite-Ons. The diference between burning a CD at 32x and at 24x on otherwise identical burners was 15 seconds for 630Mb. You may get up to a half a minute if you overurned an 80min disk still not much.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

If not LG, I'd say Liteon.

 

[CougTek]

I have a friend way up north (Manitoba, Canada) who...

...Who should buy either a Lite-On LTR-30123S 32x/12x/40x for 90$CDN or a Lite-On LTR-40125S 40x/12x/48x for 105$CDN at NCIX.com. I used both and they are very good (the 32x is very quiet, but of course slightly slower).

Or maybe she could look for bargains at some local computer shops. Locally, I can get the same 32x for 81$ and the 40X for 95$ and I don't have to spend for shipping. But I'm in a relatively big city and she's in Saskatchewan where there isn't much of anything except grass and cows... Maybe she could find a good place anyway.

 

[Tea]

I have a 12X LG at home which has been perfectly servicable. Belinda (Kristi's mum) has one too. Sold a half-dozen Lite-On 16X drives a while ago, none came back. You can't complain about a 0% failure rate, though that's hardly a fair sample size.

But the temptaton for me to play with other brands of CD burner is just about zero. We are getting such geat results with our Mitsubushis that there is just no percentage in carrying anything else. We had 16X, 24X and now 32X Mitsubushi burners, and they are so cheap now that we don't bother to include CD readers with our systems, just use a Mitsubushi 32X burner as standard.

 

[CougTek]

...with our Mitsubushis...We had 16X, 24X and now 32X Mitsubushi burners...just use a Mitsubushi 32X burner as standard.

Someday, you'll have to explain me what's that bushy thing about Mitsubishi in Australia...

 

[Jake the Dog]

tea lives a fair way from the big smoke, and although she's not in the outback, us ignorant city slickers call anything outside of 100ks of melbourne "the bush". maybe it's caught on in ballarat and they consider themselves in the bush.

 

[Buck]

i, that price is about twice as much as I'd sell LGs 32x10x40x and I would even throw in Roxio 5.1, a manual and cables.

 

[Tea]

Ballarat is 120k from Melbourne. You got it Jake. Bush! :wink:

 

[Jake the Dog]

i'm often misunderstood but thankfully you have shown eveyone that here i really know my stuff tea. anyway, back to the fairies...

 

[Fushigi]

Another vote for the Lite-On 32x. I put one in my fiancee's machine early this year and it has been trouble-free. No coasters & no media compatability issues so far.

My system's burner, a Yamaha 4x4x16 SCSI unit, is so dated now that I will replace it sometime after our honeymoon. My standard is that I buy what I consider to be the relative best available (performance, warranty, price, reputation are all factors), and in this case I will also go for a high RW speed & Mt. Rainer support. Burn speed is good, but anything over 24x is fast enough. Read speed .. anything over 32x is also fast enough (although I'd love to see TrueX tech applied to a burner, even just the read portion). So RW performance will likely be my guage after the other factors are considered.

- Fushigi