PC overhaul
At last, after serving me proudly (I hope ;) for almost two years, my dear Lite-ON 811S DVD burner has retired. For the last couple of months it had troubles ejecting disks, and finally I decided that the time has come. I went online and bought myself a brand new burner.
I was going to be loyal to the brand at first. After all, the burner served me quite well for cool two years… I had my eye on LITE-ON 20X DVD+/- R/RW Burner when I noticed that alone with many good reviews it also had quite a few negative ones. It almost looked like it was going to be one of those hit or miss kinda products, depending on what you are going to use it for. So, I looked around a bit more and decided to go with SONY 16X DVD+/- R/RW. Priced at whopping $42.99 ($5 more than a bit speedier LITE-ON), this baby promised to be a rock-solid drive (at least according to newegg customers). Last thing that tipped the scales was the fact that (as somebody mentioned) this drive was a bit quieter than some of the other ones out there. To me this was a deal breaker :-) I’ve put quite an effort to build completely noiseless PC and this wasn’t about to change :)
Oh yeah, and while I was at it, I also picked up a new hard drive. My Biostar TForce 6100 MoBo has two IDE as well as two SATA interfaces. So far I’ve been using EIDE (ATA) drives, and lately I’ve been noticing that hard drive I/O was a bottleneck. In this department my pick was the Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. And once again, according to the reviews, this drive was very quiet, and it’s 3.0Gb/s was going to be a stunning improvement over my current ATA 133Mb/s. Finally, it was priced at $69.99, which I couldn’t believe…
As usually, newegg.com didn’t take long to come thru with my purchases and last Monday, when I came back from work - the new toys were awaiting for me.
The new drive became my new primary hard drive. I re-loaded Windows, re-installed most of the soft I use on a daily basis and here I am, back in business. The new hard drive is flying - IT IS FAST! And what I really enjoy the most is the fact that I don’t hear it at all - not even when it’s seeking! Increadible. Today I also had a chance to test DVD burner. I used nero express to copy a standard (one layer) DVD - 18mins from the moment I inserted the original to the moment I extracted the copy - not bad at all. 16X is definitely an improvement over my old 8x LiteON.