Are CD drives getting less usable as time passes?

[bhoggett]

I've recently bought a Plextor PleXCombo PX-320A DVD/CD-RW drive, and I have to admit I'm quite pleased with it. The drive is relatively quiet when reading, and performance is quite acceptable, a huge improvement over my old PleXWriter 4/2/20 drive.

OTOH, I've had both a 48X CD-R and a DVD drive that took ages to get up to speed and sounded like jet aircraft taking off.

It depends on the drive. Not all new/fast drives are bad, and not all of them are good.

[bhoggett]

@JJ

Well I will give HP my vote.

My first burner was an HP back in the mid-90s. It cost me a whopping grand (1,000 UKP) and the CDs were about a tenner each.

Frankly it was a nightmare. I don't think it EVER worked properly, and eventually I replaced it with a Phillips (which was also quite dodgy). It wasn't until I got my 4x Plextor that I finally had a reliable writer, and it lasted me for years. In fact it still works fine now.

4x might not be fast for burning, but 20 mins isnt too long to wait for a cd.

Ahem... *choke*...

20 minutes is an age to wait, unless you only burn CDs very rarely. With having got ADSL not too long ago, I found my hard drives were getting clogged up with data and programs simply because I couldn't be bothered to wait while I compiled and burned backup/storage CDs. A couple of weeks ago I gave in and bought a PleXCombo drive (DVD player+CD-RW) because I felt my old writer was too slow and my old DVD drive was unreliable. What an excellent buy it has been - I'm chuffed to bits with it.