On Thursday 27 October 2005 21:16, BandiPat wrote:
I'm careful for Sony drives, although they make good hardware, they are the ones pushing for hardware copy protection and all that. Hence I avoid them. [snip] I think I would agree with Hans here. Although some of the earlier Sony models that Randy mentioned seem to work nicely, I'm not sure I would look at anything newer than those. After doing research recently in
On Thursday 27 October 2005 12:08 pm, Hans du Plooy wrote: preparation of purchasing a unit, the LG model GSA-4167B got my vote and works wonderfully in Linux!
Just to clarify, all the Sony drives I have ever used worked 100% in linux, and I still get new client boxen that are fitted with Sony drives. I have never had any problem with them. Their CD players are also good, their Discmans have by far the best sound quality I have heard on a Discman. They know how to make optical drives. My gripe with them is not with their hardware, but with their attitude towards people's freedom to write whatever they like on a CD/DVD. They don't trust us not to be criminals. That is my problem with the whole anti-piracy issue. Hardware copy protection is like selling cars that can't drive, because you can't trust the average citizen not to run someone over. I don't know what LGs stance is on copy protection. I haven't heard anything from them for or against. But their CDRW and DVDRW are reasonably priced, perform very very wel, operate very quiet, and simply don't break. (They had some dodgy CDROMs though). I would give Philips my support, because they have actually condemned the idea of hardware copy protection. Unfortunately I cannot find them locally, so I have to find something else. Makes I would avoid: AOpen - broke my genuine Windows 2000 CD (blessing in disguise, but it could have been my SUSE CD!). They're noisy, they don't last. Sony - see above HP - since their early CDROM drives, right through to their current drives, I've had discs written on an HP drive that simply wouldn't read in some other drives. And they don't last. And they're expensive. Makes I would recommend: LG - see above. Incidently, LG's drives are made by Hitachi. Philips - see above plus, after a lifetime of owning a variety of Philips products - TV, soundsystem, electric shaver, toaster, ect - I have never seen a Philips product fail. BTC - yet to see one fail, they perform well, they're not expensive TEAC - see BTC. If it can survive my parents it can survive anything. Plextor - in the days when CD writers were too expensive for everyone to own one, one of the engineering labs at the university had one machine with a CD writer for everybody's use. Can't remember the brand, but seeing as there's a permanent queue of people waiting to burn something, from 6 AM to midnight, this drive didn't last a month. They replaced it with a Plextor IDE drive. This was three years ago, I believe that same drive is still running there. Yamaha - I have seen Yamaha drives in similar situations like the Plextor above. Never heard of one failing, never heard of any compatibility issues. And they have a drive that has both SCSI and IDE interfaces! Again, like Philips, every single Yamaha product I've ever owned/worked with have impressed me. Hope that helps.