For Christmas my Dad has offered to buy me a DVD burner so I can better archive photos and make slideshows, etc.
I was wondering if anyone had any advice/suggestions...
BTW, I've already decided that it'll be external...
Thanks!
(and thanks to Dad too!)
I'm after an external one too!
Go dual layer?
Don't have must knowledge about DVD burners, but my dad bought me one as well for my birthday a few months back. Pioneer...
It doesn't seem that you could go wrong with a dual layer brand name. There are lots to choose from.
My dad will buy me one too!
Don't go for an NEC OEM drives which are rebadged as Lacie or Imation in several of their externals, I've had two now and both of them have been stuffed. USB 2 & Firewire also use more resources than the internal IDE drives so you better have a decently spec'd system or else you will be making a lot of coasters.
I have a Pioneer on my system now and a Sony on my other half's and both of them seem to be working very well with a couple hundred discs burnt so far.
Also check the forums for the brand of disc you will be buying, if you end up backing up important data onto several brands of discs (not nescessarily just the cheap ones) you may have lots of trouble reading the data back and if you change drives in the future the problem may occur anyway.
I have 30 or so DVD's of photos backed up now and I'm not sure that I'd trust them down the track. I had leftover Imation discs from the first drive and now these won't read on the Sony very well.
As much as it goes against what the manufacturers advise I've found that the better patched firmwares come from the hackers.
The only brand of disc I've found that works across several drives are TDK's and the most reliable discs for backing up DVD movies (your own for protection of course!) have been the Princo discs. I had heaps of trouble with CDR Princos in the old days, painful eh?