Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WOW!!, November 26, 2005
You cannot go wrong with this drive!! It burns all disks flawlessly, including DVD+R DL disks (which are starting to come down in price). I use Verbatim DataLifePlus media (high quality) and haven't had a bad burn yet. I previously owned the internal Sony 510-A which burned perfectly, but was soooooo slow in comparison. This puppy screams!
On that note, I have this hooked up to a firewire port and if you have questions about the speed of firewire vs usb 2.0, you can put them to rest re: this burner because it's amazingly fast with firewire.
You can use this drive horizontally or vertically. If you place it horizontally, it's a little annoying to reach across to push the tray eject button, which is located on the top of the unit if you place it vertically....but...that being said...it's the only con I can come up with.
I like the Nero software, especially Nero Recode which enables me to backup my personal movie collection. As you can tell, I highly recommend this drive!
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent drive - fast and no coasters!, January 23, 2006
I purchased this external DVD drive about 3 months ago when it had just been introduced. I was needing to make up back-up copies of my Hollywood and Bollywood DVD's. I have a single layer DVD internal write drive on my computer but this means having two discs for each movie DVD, which is a pain in the neck.
I have always yearned to make single disc copies of DVD movies but the cost of the media was too high to make it ecomically viable. Recently, dual layer media prices have come down.
I researched the new DVD dual layer drives extensively. I tried out the LG, the Maxtor, and the Plextor at home. Unfortunately, I had problems with each of these drives writing to Memorex (by far the cheapest) dual layer media. After several coasters and many hours of frustration, I finally got this new Sony drive from Best Buy.
I cannot recommend this product too highly. It is fast and very reliable. It has a beautiful form factor and spits out fast copies of 2+ hour movies in 10 minutes. I use DVDshrink to rip the movie and then mostly DVDshrink to burn the copy. Make sure that you set the bitsetting to DVD-ROM. This is most important to increase the likelihood that your DVD player will accept the copy. By the way, DVDshrink is one of the most elegant shareware/freeware programs out there.
Ironically I have had more problems burning expensive Verbatim dual layer media. For some strange reason, some of my DVD players will not accept these discs. No problems with Memorex media though!
Nero's excellent software suite accompanies this drive. There are several programs in this suite that are very useful, including Nero Burning SE and Nero DVD authoring.
All in all a truly high quality product - worth every penny.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great value for an external DVD/CD combo drive, February 23, 2006
We bought this external drive after learning that our friends lost all but a couple months worth of photos and/or videos from their first year with adorable triplet daughters. It resulted from the dreaded and inevitable hard-drive crash that everyone fears, but nobody thinks will happen to them. Attempts by two data recovery firms were unsuccessful and now they're left with whatever printed photos they and their family and friends could find.
Expecting our first child in less than three weeks, we don't want to find ourselves in the same predicament, especially with years of other irreplaceable photos, financial data and other documents on our laptop. Now we're doing weekly, monthly and annual backups and storing some of those offsite to protect against something even worse than a simple crash of a hard drive. Even if we don't completely stick with this new regimen, it's better than what we used to do -- which, though thankfully uneventful, was absolutely nothing.
If that's not enough to make you want to buy this, then the Sony name, quality, reliability and ease of use should be. The drive is small, stylish, easily installed and takes up little space in the vertical position. Although it's a little loud when the drive is working, it reads and writes CD-R media up to 48x, Ultra Speed Plus CD-RW up to 32x, DVD+/-R up to 16x, and High Speed DVD+RW up to 8x. After a lengthy initial full backup using the included Nero BackItUp software (about 8 GB onto 10 old CD-R discs in 2.5-3.0 hours), smaller differential monthly backups and incremental weekly backups to 8x DVD+RW discs take between 10 and 20 minutes each when compressing, copying and verifying everything. Backup copies of our 4 GB wedding DVD onto 8x DVD-R discs took about 15-20 minutes.
The Nero software seems very extensive, but I haven't used much of it so far. The interface is pretty intuitive and it's easy to find what you want to do, but some of the more detailed or technical options might be overwhelming for someone who's new to this kind of software or doesn't want to spend a lot of time reading the PDF manual. The only real complaint I have is with the BackItUp program's job scheduler, which only gives you daily, weekly and yearly frequency options (you need to set up monthly backups as weekly jobs and either disable or skip them for several weeks in between months), it takes forever to re-scan files when building a new job on an existing one (setting up subsequent daily, weekly or monthly jobs based on the initial full annual backup), and the data you can change for an existing job is limited (can't rename it or alter the content without creating a whole new job).
Overall, great external DVD/CD drive for watching video, listening to music and backing up data. Good software that's intuitive and functional with some room for improvement, but there's no real need for additional software you don't already have. Excellent value -- bought it at Amazon for under $160 with taxes and free shipping, and got a $30 mail-in rebate from Sony. Also bought pack of 25 Ritek 8x DVD+RW discs from TheTechGeek.com for $33 delivered and they threw in a free 10-pack of Velocity 8x DVD-R discs. So, for well under $200 and a little effort, you too can view, hear, copy and/or backup your valuable photos, videos, tunes and other data in no time!
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