I had a NEC ND3550 optical drive, and it died. I think it produced smoke and everything. I was playing Civ III of all things. I was thinking of getting a Plextor, is it worth the cost to get 18x read speed (or whatever speed it was)? What’s a good price for an optical drive nowadays? I got mine free from work. I want performance, but I’m more than willing to pay to get best bang for buck (i.e. efficiency). Any opinions?
Given prices here, I’d say 60$ ought to get you a good drive at a retail store. (Cheaper online though).
I’ve never really had a problem with any name brand (though I did fix a nobody-name drive a dozen times before pitching it back with my 486).
BenQ is a newer company that aims for low prices while still having good quality hardware IMHO. I have one of their first DVD burners and it still works great.
If you want to pay more, I’ve always been impressed with the quality of Lite-on products, and would pay up to ~10% more to get their stuff over anyone else’s. (Too bad for them the BenQ was more like 25% ;)) My first CD burner was a Lite-On, and continues to function perfectly to this day.
Newegg has a sale on lite-on products now, incidentally.
I guess I’m in a similar boat as the OP. My CD-writer/DVD-Rom drive no longer reads CDs. It still reads DVDs, though, go figure. At the moment I’m using the other drive, a DVD burner, to write both DVDs and CDs as well as play the CDs the other drive doesn’t recognize. Is there any reason I’d want to replace the broken one with another of the same rather than another DVD-writer? I can’t think of anything, but I thought it’s worth asking.
Remember, too, the price will depend somewhat on what you want. A simple DVD-ROM drive will be pretty cheap (I have a LiteOn JLMS XJ-HD1665 I’m quite happy with that I probably paid about $50 for) while a DVD burner will still be rather expensive. My current CD burner is a TDK 5200B which I’m quite happy with, and I might have paid $100 for that, although I see someone got one off eBay for like $12.