Price Guide, November 2005: Storage
by Haider Farhan on November 19, 2005 7:36 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
We would like to conclude this month's storage guide with our outlook on optical drives. DVDRs are extremely cheap now and are a great way to create backups for your system. With all builds, you want to have at least one optical drive, so we suggest you look into a DVD+/-RW to cover all of your optical necessities. You will be able to burn both DVDs, CDs, and be able to read them as well.
Our two favorite drives are the NEC 16X ND-3540A [RTPE: ND-3540A] and the BenQ 16X DW1640 [RTPE: DW1640] both on sale for about $43.00 shipped. Between the two, we found the BenQ DW1640 to be the better performer, which you can read more about in Purav's Summer 2005 16x DVDR Roundup. Besides these two drives, we also recommend other brands like Lite-On, LG and Plextor. Lite-On, LG, NEC and BenQ are in the same price ballpark, but at the moment, your best option is to go with the NEC or BenQ only because of the pricing. On the other hand, Plextor is always the most expensive of the bunch and one we don't recommend because of that. These all perform very close to each other, so we suggest the cheapest one you can find at the moment.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
rrcn - Saturday, November 19, 2005 - link
Updated. ;-)AtaStrumf - Saturday, November 19, 2005 - link
I guess this is it. HDD prices have been very stable for quite some time now and it doesn't look like this is going to change anytime soon. Too bad :-( because there's always the need for more storage. I've been hoping to get a 300 GB drive for a while now, but the prices refuse to drop to current 250 GB levels which is as high as I'm willing to go. 250 GB is just not enough of an improvement over my 200 GB drive. I suppose I'll give it another 6 months then.