I was going to recommend buying a Benq DW1640, but in the middle of
writing this I checked to see where it could be purchased. It seems to
be off the market now. I not long ago was looking for a new dvdrw drive
and read many reviews, in the end I bought the Benq drive. It has some
nice new technology that lets it make educated guesses on the writing
strategy to use with a certain type of media. Unlike other drives that
have to have the media in a predetermined list stored in the firmware.
It looks like it has been replaced by the Benq DQ60, but the DQ60 is a
completely different beast, and a bad one at that. Reading further I see
it has improved with newer firmware, but still should be avoided. In the
next month or so it looks like a DW1650 and DW1655 will come out to
properly replace the DW1640.
[technical crap]
The DW1640, when paired with software that writes CUE/BIN images in
DAO/96 (scrambled/raw) mode works very well, but this drive will not
write Mode 2 tracks in either TAO or DAO/Cue modes at all. The firmware
rejects write page for TAO recording and rejects the cue sheet even
though Mode 2 TAO is required in the MMC specs. As a result, it can be a
pain when writing VCD's or other single or mixed-mode discs with Mode 2
tracks. For cdrdao, you must use generic-mmc-raw. I am not sure if
cdrecord can scramble the image and write in DAO/96 mode; someone else
may know.
[/technical crap]
When writing ISOs, it is a REALLY nice drive :-) CUE/BIN and Mode-2 ISO
images can be hit/miss in linux because of the Mode-2 problems.
-Scott
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