A while back, I made the horrible mistake of trying to burn a 3.4gb ISO with a regular CDR drive. The results were both crippling and traumatic. I spent most of my free time mourning the loss of my only means of backing things up. Without a burner I am nothing and that’s never a good thing.

My only option was to pursue some other hardware. Procure even. I was fairly happy with the Asus CDR drive and so I made the brand loyalty choice of buying a 8×8 DVDRW drive. It does all the +,- formats as finally the +,- format war has cooled down. I bought it from newegg.com, the greatest store or object ever created in the universe. Yes I checked.

Newegg had great pictures of the drive and a great price. $120 but don’t quote me on that. They shipped it for next to nothing ($3) and it came within a week. Newegg r0x0rs my socks.

For the curious, the exact model is ASUS DRW-0804P. It does

• DVD+R 8x
• DVD+RW 4x
• DVD-R 8x
• DVD-RW 8x
• DVD read 12x
• CDR/CDRW 24x
• CD read 40x

The installation was a cinch. Unplugged my broken drive, plugged in the cables back into the new drive and powered on. XP recognized the drive with no driver or download needed (SP1 – don’t know if that’s related to SP1 or not).

So really the manuals that came with the drive are pretty useless since the install is so easy. I’m not complaining, it’s just easier than the ASPI hell days of long since past.

I ordered a spindle of DVD+R 8x blanks. They didn’t work for crap. I got some weird “cannot close disc at once session” or something like that in Nero. Tried two different discs. Google groups says it’s related to bad media. Think the media I ordered was Ritek. Suck it Ritek.

I then ran out to Office Depot and paid way too much for much less quick DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs. I could only buy 5 of each because the unit price was like $3 or more per disc. I couldn’t swallow too much of that. After playing with Satan in retail hell, I headed home and my identical burning tests worked fine on a 2x Memorex DVD-RW. Suck it Ritek.

So I suggest doing your homework as to what media is good and what is bad or sucking it up and heading out to a retail chain. Chances are, something stocked on a shelf is going to work. Ritek may no longer get my business by court order of me.

After the little bit of media trouble, the drive was working really great. It’s amazing to think you can almost fit 5000 megs on one disc instead of 640 or 700. It really opens up the possibilities not to mention the performance.

It can back up data very quickly. Many people fail to realize that CD 1x is equal to 170k/sec while DVD 1x is equal to 1,385k/sec. So really you are burning a faster disc: a 1x DVD is equal to a 8x CDROM.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the little bit of money to replace something that was inferiorly broken. Upgrades are almost never worth the money unless the thing “no blinky blinky”. I’m burning 4 mp3′d albums, 5 divx movies and other misc data onto a single disc right now. The technology is definitely a step in the right direction for people that stock pile their data away never to be seen again. It’s a happy day for pack rats.