Memorex 3202 3235 Internal DVD+/-RW+/-R 4x Dual Format Drive

Rating:
Summary: A good burner for a good price.
Review: Considering this was the cheapest one on the shelf, I didn't expect much, but I must say I was quite surprised. Installation was simple, within 10 minutes of cracking the case of my computer I was burning DVDs. The included Roxio software was a decent package covering most of the stuff you'd do with a DVD burner. Maybe not the best software package for power users, but for the average user it has everything they need. I'm very pleased with it.

Rating:
Summary: Memorex duel format dvd
Review: I purchased the product and installed the drive in my dell computer system (xp OPERATING SYSTEM). The hardware instalation was flawless.
I installed the ROXIO software and attemted to play a dvd with the dvd player from ROXIO. Kept getting an error and was never able to play a dvd.

Tried to duplicate a dvd that I had made on a phillips dvd recorder
The ROXIO program coppied 99 % and then came up with an error and could not continue.

Since none of the software worked I took the product back to where I had purchased it.

POOR SOFTWARE

Rating:
Summary: Great for data backup
Review: I purchased this drive to mainly use as a data backup device. Switching from film to a digital camera was an excellent decision, but at this point my picture files are over 4G and growing, so I needed a better backup scheme than a pile of CD's. (I picked this drive because it got a very good review in PC World, and looked like the best multiformat drive. And a good deal here on Amazon with a rebate.)

Because I'm not using the drive to burn videos, all I will report at this time is that installation and setup went fine. For data files the Roxio 6.1 software works to burn DVD+R and DVD+RW and CD-R/RW. I haven't tried DVD-R or DVD-RW yet, and I'm not sure I'll bother since my DVD readers handle the +R disks I've created ok.

I am running a one-year old Gateway desktop with Windows XP-Pro. The desktop was purchased with two hard drives, a DVD drive and a CD-RW drive. I replaced the CD-RW with the Memorex DVD dual format drive. There really wasn't anything too tricky about removing and replacing the CD-RW with the Memorex.

Gateway's manual shows some good pictures on how to remove and replace the old CD drive, and the Memorex instructions were clear and showed how to set the 'jumper' on the back of the new unit, in my case to 'slave' because I was setup with two hard drives and two optical drives. All I had to do was unplug the power cable and bus from the old drive, and replug into the new unit.

When I installed the Roxio 6.1 software it saw that I had V5.0 installed and told me it needed to remove that version before it installed the new version. Some very slight confusion after it removed V5.0 and asked if it was ok to restart the machine...when I clicked 'yes' it didn't restart but took me back to the installer...when I clicked 'next' it THEN went ahead and restarted. The rest of the installation was uneventful.

I found the Roxio V6.0 interface a little confusing, so simply use the 'classic' interface which looks like what I've been used to in V5.0. (Again, I've just backed up data, so other modules like audio and video will be different.)

I was going to 'upgrade' the Basic Roxio software that came with the unit off the Roxio site, but discovered in checking Amazon that it would be much cheaper to buy it here than from the publisher(!). However, the reviews for the software scared the heck out of me, so I'm just going to work with the basic version for a while.

The reason for my review is to let people know that the drive and software installed very easily with no hitches, given my hardware configuration and operating system. (Keep in mind I haven't tried to hook up video or copy audio disks.) I would purchase this again in a second.

As far as speed, writing to CD-R seems about as fast as the unit it replaced. Copying 3.5G of data (almost all .jpg) files took a bit under 10 minutes to DVD+R, which is fine for my situation.

A last note on DVD formats, there is a good description of the differences at timefordvd.com. And, nobody mentions it much, but this drive also handles the DVD-ROM format, which might be an advantage for some folks.