LITE-ON vs SAMSUNG vs PIONEER

Lite-On : I've got 4 of these works like a charm (2 on each PC)
Samsung: never used it - so I can't say
Pioneer: Works great for a few months, but it has issues reading CDRs/DVD-Rs from other writers. If you burn a disc at high speed, chances that it won't read are high. Not sure if they fixed this issue, but Pioneer read heads aren't that great.

+1 Samsung

Get the samsung and then flash the firmware. Will give you the best performance, 18x read speed and fixes how the drives handles spinup and spin down. Something all of the manufacturers are too lazy to do despite how simple it would be to fix. For those who don't know, the issue is that the drives often won't spin up to full speed, they'll get stuck on one of the speed steps. Then on the other side of the hump they'll pointlessly start to step down to lower speeds. The flash will make it jump up to full speed and stay there the whole time, greatly improving write times. No one has complained about this causing any errors either.

The firmware is update utility is included with the Samsung drives. Basically it allows you to download firmware updates from Samsung over the net.

I doubt its a custom firmware, in all likely hood he is talking about the firmware released by the manufacturer. I just bought 2 of these burners from newegg a few hours ago, the samsung one you posted. I was looking into dvd burners a little bit before reading your post, and well this drive seems quite good, espically for the price and free shiping doesnt exactly hurt either.

I should hopefully get the drives in the next few days along with my new 640gig calvaier black HD, I post here if I remember. (most likely it be if I find a fault with the drives)

Well I havent really had a chance to use the new stuff I got, been extremely busy, I only gone so far as to burn a couple dvd's on each burner, and finally got an OS on the HD and partitioned off to how I want it, but havent installed any programs on it yet.

The samsung dvd burner is working good, its quite quiet and is really short, shorter than I had imagined. I don't think they could make it any shorter and still have it fit in our computers. As for the person who pointed out I probably have a complaint about the drive, well I do. It was a pain to instal them in my case, but thats not the drives fault it was my fault for buying a POS case, oh and im not a fan of the big round button to open the drive im old school and like the rectangle button

The hard drive though from what I seen is quite fast, didn't take to long to format it and get it up and running. And to be honest I have never seen such a fast boot up time in my life as I have seen with this drive, errr I take that back my friends EEE PC boots faster which he got the same day I got my HD, but lets ignore that. Well anyway the new HD is about twice as fast as my 200gig HD I was using for a boot drive so im quite happy.

On a last note, this may be just a rambled on incoherant post, quite frankly I have no clue I was up for around 32hours or so solid trying to get a bunch or work I needed to be done and I had just gone to sleep for an hour or 2 now and got woken up to get food and wrote this post, so it may or may not make sense.