Hey guys I am in the market for a burner to replace an old external HP 8200 series. This time I want an internal. Since the prices have come so far down I may as well get one that does DVD as well as CD. I havent kept up with them for quite sometime. I know Plextor used to be all the rage for CD burners. Is that still the case? Do they all now have Buffer underrun protection?
My pc is Pent III 500 mghz Windows 98 SE. 256 MB Ram
Here are my preferences.
1. Dual layer DVD and CD media burning capabilities.
2. Good performance
3. Low price
4. I prefer the white or beige color (over black) so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb in my tower.
5. Lightscribe would be nice but, I could live without it.
6. One bundled with nero would also be nice but, not a deal breaker either.

As you can see I'm not all that picky about it. I don't need a bunch of bells and whistles that you dont really need.

Check out Tiger Direct. They have good deals on burners. I've got 2 NEC Dual Layer Dual Format burners, both for under $50 each. Both came with an OEM version of Nero and I've had no complaints at all. Burned over 500 dvd's so far. Good performance and no problems due to the drives. I once had a spindle of dvd's that I couldn't burn but after going so far as to update the firmware and still having the same problem with both drives I took the spindle back, exchanged it for the same type and brand and they burned fine so it had to have been just a bad spindle.

Thanks AdioKIP, I decided to go with a Pioneer DVR-110D from supermediastore. I read some good reviews from users at Nextag.com. Got it for less than 50 bucks including shipping. Should have it later in the week. How did you set yours up? Primary or secondary IDE? Master or slave?

I have one burner on the primary ide channel as slave. The second burner on the secondary ide channel as master with a hard drive as slave. Alot of people will disagree with this configuration saying both hard drives should be on the primary and both dvd burners on secondary, but for me this way works better. This configuration allows me to burn burner to burner on the fly with no problems, or I can burn from the hard drive and can burner to either burner depending on which hard drive the data is burning from, I simply use the burner that is on the opposite ide channel. This helps avoid buffer underruns in all the situations. I know most people would say this shouldn't be a problem since newer drives have protection against, but all the protection does is slow down the burning process so I prefer to avoid the problem completely...

I've got mine and it works great. It didn't come with any software but, I already had that so I didn't care. Guess you can't expect much for $40. The bottom line is so far it's a quality burner.