Although I have had my fast CD-RW drive and was happy with its performance, it clearly was time to upgrade to DVD recording. Reasons were several: making archive copies of my video footage, making backups of my DVD-Video, making backups of my computer files. I have managed to get
NEC 2500A for $69 (after rebates), which is a very good price for a dual-format 8x DVD burner. The price was good, but the best part is its performance.
Some Features The NEC 2500A can record on DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW discs as well as on CD-R and CD-RW. It supports CD Text recording but does not feature Mount Rainer support (drives with this feature have faster packet writing). The drive has 2Mb buffer and buffer underrun protection.
The burning speeds are: up to 8x for DVD formats, up to 40x for CD-R and up to 24x for CD-RW. The read speeds approach 12x for DVD-ROM, 8x for recordable DVDs, 40x for CD-R and 24x for CD-RW.
Impressive speeds and functionality indeed, but I have had some major frustrations installing this drive. Fortunately, the problem was not the drive, but the software I had before the drive was installed. This means, that if you get this drive, you will not experience the problems I had. But I think it is useful for you to know what might happen if you
both try to install the drive and replace the software (in case you had Easy CD Creator 5 before).
Installation I have had
BUSLink CD-RW drive and wanted to replace it with this DVD dive. I also had both Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum and
NERO Burning ROM 5.5 software for CD recording.
The drive cames with no software, so make sure you have software for DVD and CD burning or plan on buying it. One of the options of getting this drive with software is to get
Pacific Digital (U-30201) 8X DVD?‚A?RW Dual Format DVD Burner. But in this case you might either get NEC 2500a or LiteOn 811S, so it is a gamble.
The drive hardware installation took less than 5 minutes, including the removal of the previous drive. After replacing the
CD-RW drive with this DVD burner (jumper set as Cable Select), my Windows 2000 Professional recognized the drive and I could read DVD and CD discs. However, after I installed Roxio CD and DVD Creator 6 Basic, upon reboot, my computer refused to acknowledge not only the presence of the DVD Burner (secondary slave) but it couldn't see my Artec DVD-ROM drive (secondary master) either.
In the device manager, I could see that the device driver for both of them "failed to load" ("error 31"). I spent 5 hours reconnecting drives and reinstalling Windows (silly me, I should have searched the almighty Web for answers before doing so). Only after going to the Internet and researching the "error 31" did I find out that Roxio CD Creator 5 does not uninstall itself cleanly and leaves some garbage in Registry rendering your drives inaccessible.
After I removed a couple of registry values and rebooted my computer, the drives were recognized and both Nero 5.5 and Easy CD Creator 6 worked.
Burning DVDs with Nero 5.5 I decided to use my existing copy of
NERO Burning ROM 5.5 to write DVD-Video discs and it worked well (after I installed the latest update to it from the NERO web site). I do use Roxio 6's packet writing software (called "Drag-to-disc") and their Creator Classic tool, but most of the time I use
NERO.
Performance So far, I have recorded about 25 CD-R discs to date (Imation, Maxell, Memorex,
Sony, Precision), several CD-RW (Imation, Acer), 15 DVD+R (KHypermedia by CMC, Philips by CMC) and 4
Imation DVD-R. All recorded successfully with no coasters.
I have read online that NEC 2500A was supposed to provide great recording reliability on even not-so-good media and so far it was the case. I don't consider some of the Memorex and Precision CD-R media to be great and I was dubious about KHypermedia DVD+R discs made by CMC, but all of them were recorded and played.
The DVD discs were recorded at 2.4x (since the media did not support higher speeds). The CD-RW discs I have are 4x compatible and were recorded at 4x. The CD-R were recorded at or close to their highest certified recording speeds.
The DVD-Video discs I made played perfectly in my
Panasonic S35 DVD player, in my father's
Panasonic RV32 DVD player, in mother's
Panasonic RV31 DVD player, on my girlfriend's
Panasonic S25 DVD player and my computer's
Artec DVD-ROM drive. The CDs played in the
DVD player, my car stereo and my portable CD player. All with no hiccups.
Bottom Line The NEC 2500A is an great choice for recording virtually any format short of Panasonic's DVD-RAM. It burns DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, CD-R and CD-RW fast, reliably and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
