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Recommend Me A Solid DVD Drive For Ripping CD's

S

svet-am

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jan 6, 2003
Messages
5,146
I still like to purchase physical CDs so that I have the liner notes and can rip at my own settings.

In my PC, the main thing I use my optical drive for is ripping CDs and installing the ocassional games. By far, I rip more CDs than I do anything else with the drive.

I recently (July 2012) purchased a Pioneer DVR-S20L to use as my primary ripping drive and it appears to be failing as it has recently gotten _very_ slow at rips (hard to get past 2.25x).

I had done research and thought I was getting a solid and robust drive in the Pioneer but I guess not...

What do you guys recommend for my use case?
 
Buy a ton of cheap DVD burners. When one breaks, put in a new one.

DVD burners are basically cheap commodity hardware at this point in time. No real big difference in quality.
 
buy a sony. they are cheap, and if you rip a bunch of them open, you'll find sony/NEC make the vast majority of the parts for the others
 
Darq said:
buy a sony. they are cheap, and if you rip a bunch of them open, you'll find sony/NEC make the vast majority of the parts for the others
Click to expand...

good point, I think this is what I'll do.
 
Darq said:
you'll find sony/NEC make the vast majority of the parts for the others
Click to expand...

Wrong. Currently, Lite-On make the most components and are the OEM builders for the most third-party DVD burners currently sold. Asus drives, for example, are made by Lite-On. So are several Sony-branded drives.

There are few actual DVD drive manufacturers left. Lite-On is the biggest, and there is Samsung, Sony Optiarc (the Sony/NEC joint venture that became fully owned by Sony in 2008) and a few others (and a mass of no-name Chinese manufacturers).

Optiarc is in fact shutting down its operations in March. They won't be making anything (or selling drives made by others) related to computer DVD burners/readers after that.

As to quality drives for CD ripping, I do agree that they are commodity items these days. Get a brand name drive and you shouldn't have issues. The "best drive for CD ripping" conversations became pretty much obsolete a number of years ago. Most all drives currently sold can rip an accurate stream. However, if you want to look for additional ripping features (C2 error pointers that not all drives have, etc.), this updated database can be of help (doesn't have every drive currently sold, though).
 
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Fritingo,

Thanks for the detailed conversation about this. Your last statement though...

As to quality drives for CD ripping, I do agree that they are commodity items these days. Get a brand name drive and you shouldn't have issues. The "best drive for CD ripping" conversations became pretty much obsolete a number of years ago. Most all drives currently sold can rip an accurate stream. However, if you want to look for additional ripping features (C2 error pointers that not all drives have, etc.), this updated database can be of help (doesn't have every drive currently sold, though).
Click to expand...
This is what is pissing me off. This Pioneer drive I have is 6 months old and it's already having problems. I was getting 14x+ rip speeds and now it struggles to stay above 2x. I paid $50 for it and I've only gotten 6 months of life out of it. That doesn't seem right...
 
svet-am said:
This is what is pissing me off. This Pioneer drive I have is 6 months old and it's already having problems. I was getting 14x+ rip speeds and now it struggles to stay above 2x. I paid $50 for it and I've only gotten 6 months of life out of it. That doesn't seem right...
Click to expand...
Yeah like I said: Commodity hardware. They're made a hefty profit off people who didn't know that about DVD burners. You can right now get a DVD burner for the low price of $16 shipped and still would have roughly the same performance and quality as that Pioneer drive. Considering that they must make a profit off those DVD burners, imagine how much the real cost is to produce those drives. Remember: $16!

EDIT: Though have you tried that Pioneer DVD burner in another PC to rule out possible OS, driver, SATA port, or even SATA cable issues?
 
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