Well my Yamaha CRW8824E that has served me well for about the past year and a half seems to have seen its last days. It can still read good cd's alright but the ones I burn now are becoming about 85% of the time or more unreadable. From what I can tell it did me well in its lifetime lasting approx. 1600 successful burns according to all the cdr spindle stacks I have around, I'm such a pack rat I guess.

I'm currently looking around for a good replacement to serve me well with some minimum requirements I expect from it mainly being the linux campatibilty. I also would like one that is capable of sao, dao, tao as well as read and write in raw. R/W/RW speeds are of no big concern since I still prefer to do alot of my burning at 4x speeds, just some silly belief I have on burning especially with audio and video data. It would also be nice if it had a nice track record with various copy protections for when I make backups of my various things.

With those lil requirements out of the way I have been thinking of maybe an LG since from what I know they seem to be cheap and good, just need to do more research on there cdrw's. I do have a friend that has an LG and previously had a Yamaha as well. He seems to like his LG alot and even has done more then a few successful overburns which is another requirement I'd like to have that I forgot to mention above.

Now that this post is maybe a touch longer then it should be I'll end it here requesting anyones opinions and recomendations on various cdrw's that are worth a look into getting.

Lite-on(Cendyne) work pretty well and they are relatively cheap.

just picked myself up a vertabim lite-on 40x flashed to 48x =D its nice

Wow 1600 is not many burns for the lifetime of a burner. :(

I won't even say how many discs I reckon I've done with my LiteOn 40X in the last year. :D

Well after spending the whole night researching cd burners I came down to a decision between LG or Lite-On. Lite-On looked so appealing to me with the newer ones being Full CAV writing and reading instead of Partial CAV or Zone-CLV. Just one problem for me getting Lite-On and that is here where I am in Canada there are no stores around me that deals with em :( So I grabbed hold of the LG GCE-8480B which is a 48/16/48 burner for a mere $30, that's after I get the $80 rebate :eek:

Oh and while I was there getting the burner I just so happened to spot the second harry potter dvd and just had to pick that up as well so after I install my new burner I'm gonna watch that :tup:

My friend bought a second hand Sony 2x burner in 1997, sold it to me in 1998, I used it until 2001 and my brother is using it now.

That burner has done god knows how many disc's and it's still churning them out for the fun of it!

2x write, 8x read, 384k buffer and is only TAO and the disc has to be in a cadddy! How I ever lasted so long with it I don't know especially now that I have a 52x24x52x lite on but it's done audio, video, playstation, dreamcast (inc. self boot which it isn't supposed to be able to do!), xbox, PC etc...

Takes about 45mins to do a full CD and has no kind of burnproof technology at all. You can't surf or do anything while it's burning but if you just leave it to burn you are guaranteed a good disc.

1600 hours is not a good lifespan!

Oh ok so then I guess abour 1600 discs isn't all that great but I guess it doesn't help much either when you also use it as your only cdrom but then again I could be wrong. I do know that a few months before it just died on me it was starting to act up on me then and a firmware upgrade seemed to have solve that for me. Maybe I just had a somewhat flakey cdrw to start with

Anyways now that I have my LG I am loving it a heck of a lot more then the Yamaha, runs a heck of alot quieter as well as a heck of alot faster!!!

My brother uses the old sony as his only CD as well!

i was just making the point that these things do last a surprisingly long time but as with all technology, some will last longer than others.

Glad you've got the LG - it makes a hell of difference when you buy a new a new CD-RW doesn't it? I jumped from that 2x sony to a 24x lite on (which I've since given to a friend) and now have a 52x lite on.