Customer Reviews

Asus LightScribe Internal IDE 18x DVD R/W Drive (DRW1814BLBLACK)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

So far so good. Glad I got it. No major technical problems.

-great price for a lightscribe drive.

-its only single layer but these days thats enough and double layer disks are expensive anyway. Mostly i'm using it with dvd-r's since they're supposedly slightly more commonly recognized by most drives. (I dont think thats true anymore these days but whatever). I did not find any real functional difference between dvd+r and dvd-r. Dvd+r is supposed to be slightly better quality but for my purposes it did not matter.

-hardware installation a breeze. I had to yank the jumper on the back (and thus not have any jumper) before it was correctly recognized by my system as a secondary drive.

-quiet as heck. whisper quiet.

-Comes with nero 7 Essentials. Ran the update tool on it right away. Seems to be a full featured package with tools for photo and video editing (including creating clips from various video sources), cd and dvd burning, file management. It installed a desktop search engine (nero scout) which I disabled by going into 'my computer', you'll see an icon for it, right click, options, disable.

-burning a dvd movie took 20 to 30 minutes. (I have a medium strength PC, nothing extraordinary). 2ghz pentium 4, with winXP.

Probably the 1gb RAM helps.

-lightscribe: nice to have, makes the dvd look quite nice, clean, and professionally labelled. Lightscribe takes about 15 minutes to burn an image or title, and you need to use lightscribe capable dvds (which arent any more expensive than regular dvd's if you buy spindle). Basically you flip over the disc after you've burned your data on it, and then it can burn a title or image of your choice onto the top of the dvd. Comes with an application to help you do that and edit the title or image.

-"intel application accelerator" had to be uninstalled before lightscribe worked. There's a note about this at lightscribe.com. I had installed that utility many years ago and had forgotten about it on my PC. For good measure I installed the lightscribe update from the same site but I dont think i really needed it --Who knows. it installed some files. You can try it without this update first.

I have never been more satisfied with a product as I am with this DVD R/W drive. It was very easy to install and worked flawlessly from day one. I have not had one single I/O error in the 40+ DVD's I've burned so far.

The price also makes this purchase a great value. I thought that quality would be an issue compared to my expensive Samsung and Thomson drives, but Asus dominated them both. This is an excellent device. I still smile every time I use it.

I would also like to stress that I do not work for Asus and I'm not in the business of selling anything. I'm a full-time PC Tech for the government. I strongly recommend this Asus drive.

I needed a DVD-burner to upgrade a used Dell that I just bought. So I bought this one due to all of its high reviews. Install is very easy, just plug in the IDE and power, just like any other drive you could buy. The computer detected it and I am now able to burn DVD's using Nero. Very good product!

This drive is sooo much quieter than my previous two Lite-On DVD drives. It was recognized perfectly by Windows XP and installed without a hitch. I bought it as a replacement for the Lite-On (LH20A1H) that I had to send in for replacement since it sounded more like a coffee bean grinder than a DVD drive.

The best dvd writer I've ever bought. It recognized a lot of my previous drive's coasters as actual disks that were written by my "Lite-On" coaster maker. I love the ease of installation of software and the fact that it is a Lightscribe drive at such a low price was the best piece of hardware that I have bought in a long time. Thank you.

I have purchased this item because of some positive reviews I read about it... the product arrived on time and was installed in less than 5 minutes. It has been a month now and I am very happy with it... :)

In the las few weeks this drive has worked great, I have made about 50 dvd's and not a single failed disc. The drive is super quite you have to look at the lights to see that it is actually working. Asus has another fan once again.

The drive works like it's supposed to. As simple as that. For those who still haven't a complete burning suite, the packaging includes a light version of Ahead's Nero Burning Rom application, which is a nicely thought addition (though nothing out of the ordinary. I'm not into benchmarking optical drives as I just want them to *work*, and this one delivers. I've already burned music CDs at the lowest possible speed (that's 8x on this drive), both DVD-R drives and DVD+R drives at medium and almost maximum speed (for reliability issues and not so good burning media, I never use the maximum setting). So far, I've used TDK, Memorex and Pengo (!) media and they have all worked perfectly. I was going to buy a more expensive one, but found this one and loved it specifications. Burning, extracting 4GB worth of files directly from the disc, testing music CDs into it, it all works as advertised. Go Asus.

As an extra note, I must say that my previous Cyberhome recorder (yes, a budget decision I will never make again on any type of hardware I own) bricked all 5 of the Pengo media I inserted to it and almost all of my Memorex's DVD-R's. So yes, the Asus drive can burn really really bad media (Pengo; don't even Google it).

This is an excellent burner. I got it at a cheap price through Amazon used. The only thing is it didn't come with any cables, so you will need your own cables. Also, no burning software was included, but I don't care because I use linux and normally they only send you really outdated software anyways.

A word to those who hate noise; it does make a little bit of noise especially when functioning at its fastest speeds. But it is fast and reliable from what I have seen so far and Asus is a dependable brand.

Asus LightScribe Internal IDE 18x DVD R/W Drive (DRW1814BLBLACK)

When using XP, it burned one lightscribe disk successfully, then failed to recognize disks. Problem appears to be not being addressed by ASUS, or Lightscribe. Contacted both,pawned off and ignored by tech. support. Read their boards and others on the issue, many people appear to have this problem, no solution, or help given. Typically,after first burn, only the lightscribe side of disks not recognized, but sometimes both. May be a software issue. Keeping drive only because mine functions fine as a regular drive, and not worth expense to mail back. Extremely frustrated, spent much time on issue. Understand that there are a lot of problems with lightscribe drives in general.