Which DVD-RW drive to buy?

[Sputnik]

I tried the search feature and only found that Razor121 and Agent had problems with the Samsung drives. I could not find another thread with which is the best at the moment.

I've always bought Pioneer DVD-RW's in the past but, The LG and Lite-on ones seem to be cheap. Should I stick with Pioneer? or buy something else?

The last Lite-on drive (a CD burner) I had was quite noisy.

[Agent]

My Sammy is still very finicky with disks, even pressed ones. It seems to be a common problem as you can see from the reviews on various sites. It's almost random if a disk will read - Couldn't recommend them.

I have an external Blu-ray Liteon and that's fine

[pp05]

I would recommend an external Lite-on DVD-RW if you don't use the drive frequently.

[ik9000]

Got an LG BluRay and a LiteOn DVD - both just fine IMO but yes can be noisy flat out - the LG particularly but it is a much older drive. You can reduce vibration noise using rubber grommets on the screw mounts, but when the rev up both are audible. The person who releases a totally silent BDRW drive will get my pennies before they can blink.

[kalniel]

And each model can be quite different from a maker as well - my sammy's great at reading most things It's a slightly older one (I picked the lightscribe version not because I needed that, but because it used an older unit that was better than the newer ones) - SH-S203B I think?

Did need a firmware update before it could read absolutely everything however.

[Pob255]

I've had no real issues with samsung optical drives reading stuff, one thing I will say it the samsung and lg I have seem to be slower from data transfer than my old Pioneer.
We're not talking a massive difference, only on copying large blocks of data, eg installing a game, the pioneer will shave a few seconds off it.
However I don't use it much because it's far louder than my samsung or lg

I also agree with Kalniel, model can be very important just because one model is good or bad doesn't mean all models from the same manufacture will be.

Saying that in general LG is my current favourite for DVDr/w, cannot comment on bluray as I don't have any experience with them.