LG Combo drive - decent?

[bernse]

When my power supply melted down a couple weeks ago, it took out my burner and my DVD player.

I was in my local computer store the other day and they had LG DVD-ROM,CD RW combo drives on sale 48x24x48. Comes with Nero express.

Any good? I've never had an LG or Goldstar product before.

 

[matrixwalker2002]

LG makes decent products. How much was it? I just bought a DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo Drive made by Samsung for $99. for CD's, it's 52x/24x/52x and it reads dvd's at 16x. It's the fastest one on the market. it also has an 8 MB cache and it supports the Mt. Ranier format. Others to look at are the sony 48x/24x/48x and dvd read at 16x, it comes with a 2MB buffer/cache. However, it's $99 and the Samsung is a better drive. for $79, consider the Cendyne combo drive. It's essentially the same thing as the sony, but for 20 dollars less. If you burn DVD's, i'd definitely go with the Sony or Samsung as those are the most compatible with reading the multiple DVD formats. i'm not sure about the cendyne. whatever you do, avoid the buslink, they make bad drives.

 

[Confused]

I have heard that many combo drives won't read CDs written by other drives, and/or CDs written by those drives aren't readable in other systems. Whether this is just the older ones, or it still occurs with the newer ones, I don't know.

I personally prefer having seperate drives, and wouldn't get a combo drive.


Confused

 

[matrixwalker2002]

btw, the samsung and the sony drive that i mentioned above also come with nero burning rom. not sure about the cendyne. good luck in your combo drive search.

 

[bernse]

I think it was something like $100 CDN.
I've never heard of the compatibility problems before, but I think I'll use it as my primary drive/burner and use my old reliable A-Open 52x CDROM as a backup incase I run into problems with it not reading some disks.

Does anyone know if they make their own drives or if they are rebadged?

 

[karmasalad]

I just got the LG combo drive a couple of weeks ago. It's very nice, I love it for its quiet operation and very smooth tray mechanism. The bezel is also well-done and elegantly stylish.

You can check out some of the user reviews over at Newegg.

LG used to be a brand associated with lower-end products back when they were known as Lucky Goldstar, but they have turned themselves around tremendously in the past few years and are making some pretty great stuff nowadays.

 

[Dug]

I have that drive and can confirm it has no problems reading anything.

It is the quietest and best drive I have ever used.
Burns everything I throw at it and run extremely smooth.
It doesn't have that high pitched whiny sound that my light-on had.

I'd definately recommend it over any other combo drive or seperate drives out there on the market.

 

[optimistic]

http://www.cdrlabs.com/index.php

 

[bernse]

Thanks for all the info - I'm going for it.

 

[RagingGuardian]

I happen to have the drive and not only is it the quietest drive I've ever had but it also reads scratched cds I had laying around perfectly. Another plus is that it's about 1in shorter than regular drives so it fits small cases well.

 

[bernse]

Geez. It just keeps getting better and better! This should be the "official" drive on the Anandtech forums!

 

[Auric]

They are actually Hitachi-LG, the former having the design expertise while the latter handles manufacturing and marketing. However, LG has come a long way and does make lots of good stuff despite their cheesy (former) name.

See previous thread.