Suggestion for a new burner
 

Been reading around here and other places but I was wanting to hear from some peoples experiences with a good burner. I currently have a HP8100i which worked great at the time of purchase but these days just doesnt cut it anymore and doesnt work with CloneCD.

I read that some of the newer HP's are good but was hoping to get a model # and brand of any have that have no problems with getting the job done.

Anyway any suggestions would be appreciated.

Ive got a philips 804EK 8x4x32x. It copies anything i throw at it with clone cd.
safedisk
safedisk 2 (works in any cd drive)
secure Rom

Philips drives cannot do protected psx games if i remember as they cannot select "dont repair subnchannel" in clone cd, they are also badly made drives, a good make of drive is plextor but only a few can do sdv2 backups, undoubtable the best drive ever is the plextor 8x4x32 as it can do all protections and it is a bloddy good brand, but they are very hard to get hold of.

In reference to the above, If you have a decent cd rom drive installed on your system as well as the Philips 32x8x4, you get the ability to use the reader (CD ROM - Mine is a Teac 32x) this drive will read anything you throw at it. Then use the philips to burn it over, and since a lot of people prefer to have 2 drives installed anyway (ie:On the fly burning etc...) there ain't no problem. I also have a plex 32x12x10, And I use it to do all the "normal" everyday writing, so the philips in only ever used to do SD2 or Securom titles, that way I am prolonging the life of the Philips drive.

Just because some philips drives in the past were badly made, it doesn't mean that all philips drives are bad!!! ever heard of improving stuff.
And the philips drive in question which failed alot, was also made by HP, so does that make all HP products bad??? NO!!!! Slag 'em off all you want but it works fine. I can copy all the protected cd's i want!!!

I also have a cd-rom drive that I use to do all my RAW reading (Toshiba 24x).

I bought a dirt-cheap Traxdata 8x writer, and I'm able to burn PSX and DC self-booters, using the Toshiba. I'm not 100% confident that the Traxxy will read full RAW, but I used to use the Toshiba with a Philips 3610 to copy all my old stuff.
The Philips worked a treat, until the grease dried up inside and I had to replace it. But I liked the build quality and compaitbility with many CD-Recording packages.

So I guess if your writer doesn't read full RAW you can just go and fetch a CD-ROM as recommended by CloneCD. It seems that there's an increasing number of manufacturers that deliberatly won't allow their CDWR drives to do a full RAW read. Perhpa I'm wrong.

~~Bye~~

this means if aburner in clone cd in writing mode "don't repair subchannel data off" can't be ticked because the field is gray than its allways philips hardware?

The Trax Wayniac refers to is a rebadged Philips. I agree these are not badly made writers anymore, the 2600 was crap, but that was a VERY long time ago, when the companies were still learning. I know plenty of people who have Philips 3600 drives (or Trax 2260 or HP 7200 which are the same thing) and they're all still going fine.

A drive which can do everything is the Acer 1208A. It is also a Philips inside, and with CCD3 can copy PSX, SD2, Securom and everything else you throw at it. It's a bit picky with media (just writes crap if you use rubbish discs like the blue CMC at 12x), but with the right media (it writes Ritek and Prodisc fine, and they're cheap enough) it'll be as good as gold. You need to set DJ to TAO if you want to write DC backups with it due to a bug in DJ but apart from that it's a goodun.

Thank you for the info on my Traxxy. I'd be interested to know which Philips model it is based on. it amazes me just how many writers are the same on the indside!

Bye.