I currently use two 16X DVD+-RW drives, a NEC 3520A and a NEC 3550A. The 3520A runs fine on a second older machine of mine, but it's the 3550A I'm thinking of replacing. It runs fine but it has some annoying traits:

-- When I'm playing a DVD Movie in the drive, it spins it extremely loud, so much so I need to wear a headset to drown out the noise. I can often hear it over a movie. It sounds like an airplane taking off. I've seen this with two friends of mine using the same model drive.

-- If I pause a movie and go get a drink and return, I notice that when I unpause it it spins up again and plays the movie but after 3 seconds it freezes (no playback or audio) for 2 seconds and then continues. I figured it was just refilling the buffer or something, but my 3520A doesn't do this so it's annoying.

-- It has burned some bad discs that the 3520A could burn fine. (Granted it's two different computer setups, but this seems strange. Machine 1 can multitask during a burn with the 3520A and not burn a coaster. Machine 2 can burn with no multitasking and still burn a coaster sometimes, same task)

I use TDK, iMation, and Sony Media for DVD-R's, and anything for CD-R's. It seems rather slow burning to cd-r's so I have kept my second drive in this machine, a Sony CRX217E which works great. My 3520A burns on anything I throw at it, but this 3550A seems to hate anything Verbatim.

My main concern here is Noise. I would like to find a drive which keeps the spinning to a minimum if possible, or is at least quiet about it. I burn my data DVD's at 8x and my video dvd's at 4x. I haven't tried to circumvent the firmware to speed it up or anything, but I think I may have updated the firmware once after I purchased it.

What drive brand comes next in line after NEC in terms of quality? Maybe I should make a brand change and see if it works better. If I could find a DVD burner which also does well with cd-r discs, I might consider making my two drive setup a DVD-ROM & a DVD+-RW instead.

Any suggestions?


Machine 1: Using NEC 3520A
Pentium 4 2.4ghz, 768MB ram, 200GB Hard Disk, ATI Radeon 9600 128MB AGP Video, Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Audio, Windows XP Pro SP2

Machine 2: Using NEC 3550A
Pentium D 3.0GHZ, 1.0GB Ram, 160GB Hard Disk, ATI x600 SE PCI-E Video 256MB, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Audio, Windows XP Pro SP2.