I have been away from this (and all other) forums for quite some time as I have been too busy to find the time (and am a little still, so excuse me if this seems a little like a fly-by posting. It is). I have been itching to upgrade to a Dual layer capable drive for some time now and was thinking about upgrading to the NEC 3500. The reason for choosing this model is that I have been using the previous model, (the 2500a) and have been very happy with its performance. Some of my friends had reported that some drives had trouble and only seemed able to burn certain disks and was quite happy to find that the 2500 had few problems with almost any make of disk. Can anyone give me an indication if I could expect a similarly good performance from the 3500 (and perhaps a recommendation of a good dual layer disk)
Riven - I have a NEC 3500AG , and it works flawlessly! Have yet to have a single coaster yet and it burns very good.. Buffer seems to jitter a little tho but never lower than 94% goto Newgg.com and read the reviews the NEC 3500 (AG) got if you still arent sure.. o btw, you can pick the NEC 3500 up there for under $70ish, I paid $66 for mine Now as for DL media, there is only +R DL discs out as far as I know and Ive been using Verbatim's DVD+R DL discs.. Burns @ 2.4x which is really slow I think I managed to push it to 4x using Nero 6.6.0.1 Enterprise Edition.. anyway, good luck on choosing a DL burner! you'll enjoy it once you have one {EDIT} actually I found this : http://www.extrememhz.com/nd3500a-p1.shtml hope it gives you a good info source
I also ordered mine from newegg.com and installed it today. I was impressed with the reviews it had gotten and at $72 shipped it was a steal. I only tested it to read a dvd backup I made with dvdshrink so far (I also have a sony dru-530 installed) but I'll leave more info once I mess with it for a bit.
I bought mine from newegg for 66 + free shipping, and I love it. I've burned about 20 flawless DVDs and 4 flawless PS2 games. Some people on another forum said they had to update the firmware to enable burning speeds faster the 4x, but they must be sending them out with the drives already updated, because mine burns flawlessly at 8x on my 8x media. For the price, its impossible to beat, IMO.
Mine is now working fine too,since I switched over to dvd+r discs. I had gotten errors the first 4 times I tried on dvd-r discs. I'm using DVD Shrink and Nero,my 2 questions though are: 1) Is there any way to speed up the encoding process? That takes forever. 2)Does anyone know how to turn the VOB,IFO and BUP files into dvd format once those files are saved on my computer? It would be nice to avoid the encoding process again if I want to make additional backups. Thanks
