TETSUOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!
Written: Jun 17 '02 (Updated Jun 17 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Speedy, reliable, pretty quiet, cost effective.
Cons: Heats disks somewhat, can't read small/ oddly shaped disks.
The Bottom Line: Excellent performance. Speedy, quiet, reliable, and easy to use. Highly recommended.
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| Action_Snark's Full Review: Pioneer DVD 116T Internal DVD Drive |
Yes, thanks to this little beauty, Kaneda's angry cry now spills forth from my PC's speakers, direct from my spiffy new Akira: Special Edition DVD.
First off, this review is of the Pioneer 106s slot load drive, not the 116 tray load drive(Newer drives in the DVD-116 tray load flavor will wear the part number DVD-500M, not DVD-116.) The 106s and 116 differ only in the load mechanism. I decided to go with the slot load just for sheer aesthetics. It's performance is identical to the tray loader, though feeding it mini CD's and oddly shaped disks is a no-no.
The Drive: The drive itself is a little different than most other drives. Obviously, the major difference is the absence of a large tray. The disk slot itself is placed inside a recess, which makes the drive look nice and clean. Pretty much everything else is straight vanilla, with a headphone jack, busy light, eject switch, and wheel style volume control on the drive face. The slot has a handy little gasket on it which does a great job of catching dust and wiping your disks clean. The posterior of the drive is pure vanilla, with IDE, 4 pin power in, digital audio cable in, and of course, jumpers.
The Specs:
Interface: IDE/ATAPI
Compatability: CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD (single and dual layer), DVD-R, DVD-RW, Photo CD, Audio CD, Hybrid CD, CD Extra.
Speeds: 16x max DVD read (95ms avg access time), 40x max CD read (80ms avg access time).
The Install: Nothing really to say here. Pulled the lifeless carcass of a Creative drive that had bitten the dust out of it's 5 1/4" bay, set the jumpers on the new drive, slid it in, hooked up the cables, and was off and running. I've had no issues with Windows XP or Slackware 8 taking exception to this drive. The only problem I've had is with my motherboard's BIOS, which will not boot past two IDE CDROMs (EG, Boot device 0 was my plextor plexwriter, device 1 was the DVD drive, and device 2 was my primary HDD, bios would not boot the the HDD for some reason. However, this appears to be a shortcoming of the motherboard, not the drive.) The only setup I had to do was to set the region in the drive's properties. The region may be reset up to 5 times, and after that a patch may be downloaded from Pioneer's website to permanently ( and I mean permanently ) change the drive's region.
Software: The drive I purchased came OEM, which means there was no included software decoder, which is necessary to watch DVD's. While I had no software with the drive, those wonderful Gainward folks were kind enough to include a copy of Cyberlink's awesome PowerDVD bundled with my new Geforce4. I've tried several other software decoders/players (freeDVD, winDVD, etc.) but PowerDVD has them all beat hands down. The only issue that I've had with DVD playback is bad flickering and choppiness when I run the DVD in a window and Coolinfo is active. (Coolinfo is a nifty little program that will stick status displays for your system on your desktop.)
Overall: I really like this drive. It gets a little noisy first spinning a disk up to speed, but then quiets down nicely, and performs great. It has read pretty much anything I can throw at it (Including abysmally scratched up music CD's) without batting an eye. The only issues with the drive itself are the noise when it first starts up, and the heat it generates. At the end of a movie, when you pop the DVD out, it is pretty warm. Not hot enough to damage the drive or disk, but still that disconcertingly more than a little warm. (If the slot were bigger, you could do a decent job on Pop Tarts in the thing.) The only other real shortcoming is the drive's inability to read small or oddly shaped CD's, but those are rare enough that it shouldn't really be a problem for the vast majority of users. If you're looking for a solid, stable, good performing drive, the Pioneer DVD-106s should be one of your first choices.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 49.00
Operating System: Windows
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Action_Snark
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