Ok, so you might be tempted to buy that cheap $18 DVD drive you spotted on some place like Amazon, Microcenter, or Newegg. Don’t do that! (Unless you want to buy another drive next year) Here’s why.
Let’s take the ASUS DRW-24B1ST for example. I got it for about $21 a while back, but the price has gone down to $19.99 in some places. It lasted for a couple of years, but it probably wouldn’t have lasted that long if I burned discs often. Even though most of the discs burned with it seemed OK, I noticed that some DVD players didn’t always play nice with them. I blamed the quality of the cheap DVD-Rs I was using.
Let’s fast-forward to last year. I wanted to rip my family’s Blu-ray collection to my PC so we could stream movies around the house. The 24B1ST is not a Blu-ray drive, so I picked up an LG WH16NS40 Blu-ray & DVD drive. Why would I even bring this up? Well… I’m getting to that!
There are a few forums where people often discuss the quality of drives. I’m not sure how I came across this, but I found a very detailed test involving my exact DVD drive. It apparently did worse than many of the slightly more expensive drives! I can’t say I was surprised, with how cheap the drive was to begin with.
I decided to test this for myself, by burning the same content with these drives and comparing how well they play in a finicky player back home. It gave me trouble plenty of times before, so I thought it would be a perfect test. I tested discs made with both the ASUS and LG drives. Sure enough, the disc made with the ASUS drive played about as well as a scratched disc. The disc made with the LG drive played perfectly. I repeated the test a couple of times and got the same exact results.
The interesting thing is that computer DVD drives don’t have a problem reading discs burned with this drive. I guess that’s not too surprising, since drives made for computers are typically built better than the ones found in DVD and Blu-ray players.
As of now, my ASUS drive is starting to die on me. The tray sometimes gets stuck, so I have to press the eject button several times before it finally slides out. To make things worse, it seems to be having trouble reading and writing discs. I don’t know about you, but it sounds like this drive is nothing but junk!