Any suggestions for a decent dual layer sata burner? Come across a few dodgy burners in my time and prefer to avoid any hassles. They all seem pretty cheap nowadays, I'd just prefer not having to go buy another one if the one I get is rubbish.

Quick explanation... went to burn a cd a few hours ago, found that imgburn couldn't detect either of my pata dvdrw drives... checked device manager, nothing there.

Rebooted, and checked the bios, nothing there either... So I checked the bios settings, then ripped side panel off and checked the cables, tried different drives etc.

One of those WTF IS THIS s*** moments really :/

As far as I can tell, the lone IDE controller on my motherboard has spontaneously up and died in the arse, leaving me with the option of either grabbing a cheap IDE controller card and just plugging the old drives back in, or disposing of fat IDE cables altogether and picking up a sata drive instead.

With two free sata ports and only room for one more hdd in the chassis, my choice is pretty much made for me, so any recommendations?

If a part of your mobo has died I'd get another mobo, you just don't know which part will die next.
If you want to risk it and keep the mobo, I've always been happy with pioneer burners, only ever had 2 of them since they're so awesome and never break I think my old IDE one still works some 3 or 4 years later just as well as my new SATA version.

if you're running ich9(or R) then get a sata burner for ~$50.

otherwise - spend the $15 on a cheap generic pci ide controller.

ditto what whoop said - Pioneer make very decent burners.. few people value quality over price though =/



come to think of it - the entire consumer market is driven by this o.O





last edited by koopz at 00:45:32 21/May/08

When you can buy a burner for $47 with 1 year warranty, any burner will be worth the thrashing you give it.

Koopz, what do you mean about the ICH9 (R)? I have an ICH9 on my P5KC... Ive had a bit of trouble with my mb too. Are ICH9's dodgy?

I was looking at this one.

I ended up going with IDE though.

Whoop- I agree about replacing the mobo, but I'm not overly concerned. If anything else on my desktop fails I can get by on my laptop for a while.

Cheers for the advice all.

Koopz, what do you mean about the ICH9 (R)? I have an ICH9 on my P5KC... Ive had a bit of trouble with my mb too. Are ICH9's dodgy?

not really... if anything, in terms of practical use I find the Intel ICH9r more practical than the Intel ICH8 (standard and 'r' varient).

the ich9r can handle solid state hdds, raid setups and stand alone devices (sata roms, ide iomega drives with sata converters, etc) whereas ich8 couldn't in standard mirror/stripe/raid 5/ 10/ jbod configs. if anything, ich9r *is* ich8 minus the oversights the engineers made when the design went to market.

but hey - let's pretend for a moment that hardware engies don't suffer from the same issues everyone else in IT suffer from... the marketing/sales element of the company/corp say 'get it out the door - working or not then patch it!!'.

btw - the Asus P5KC is both a DDR2 and DDR3 mobo... try not to mix ram standards again if you can avoid it mate. compliancy gets dropped in favour of compatibility (read: marketability (is that a word?)). Asus loses integretity every time is makes a mobo that features compantibility of older as well as new standard ram compatibility. Intel on the other hand refuses to run older ram/cpu configs in newer (G33 and on )boards whether they are socket 775 or not. much luv Intel

as the say: it is of teh ghey

last edited by koopz at 00:03:06 22/May/08

last edited by koopz at 00:03:35 22/May/08

u can have my lg, it wouldnt detect in bios.