Memorex 20x DVDRW DL USB 2.0 External Drive (Discontinued by Manufacturer)

THE DRIVE (5-stars)The burner arrived quickly and I had it set up in no time. I did not use the included Nero tools because I could not figure out how to do lightscribe with it. However, after a quick download of Lightscribe System Software and Control panel, I was burning away. All of my burns, even after updating to latest LSS, and boosting all contrast settings, have been on the light side, to the point where I needed to re-burn 5 more times to get an acceptable image. Thus, I'm concerned that all the extra burning could literally burn out the drive.THE TECHNOLOGY (-2 stars):* Needs more contrast! To compensate, there should be white lightscribe disks available to maximize contrast, since the "burning" is grayscale. I thought gold would help, but no, a gold background may as well be a gray background.* OK, fine, if the contrast isn't great, then there be a way to "batch" the burns, you know, let's do three burns back-to-back, without the drive opening after each burn. That's not available. So you have to burn, open, shut, burn, open, shut, etc. You understand the tedium.* Lastly, the technology is slow: requiring about a half hour for each burn. So yeah, it took 3 hours !!! to get an acceptable (but still not great) image. At least each burn is aligned almost exactly to minimize blur.I know that the 3 star rating is not entirely due to the drive, but to fully enjoy the drive, the supporting technology has to be mature as well, and sorry, it's not there yet.

I bought this drive as a secondary drive to the one that is built into my laptop which only reads and writes at a maximum of 8x, plus it does lightscribe labeling. The drive is easy to setup but you have to go to a secondary source to get the lightscribe system software, which you need to actually to burn labels. I am running Windows 7, 64 bit, with a fast processor and 4 GB of memory but the lightscibe software is quirky and burning labels seems to be a hit-or-miss proposition. The drive does read and write discs at a good speed, so I can read a disc in about 6 minutes and burn a disc in about 10 minutes, where my old drive was at about 20 minutes to read and about 30 minutes to burn a disc. The read function is pretty reliable and the drive burns well with Verbatim discs but it didn't like the cheaper Polaroid discs that I bought and gave me 3 toasters out of 10 discs, so I am reading discs with this drive and burning them with my old drive. All in all, this is a decent drive for the price ($19.95 + shipping) but I would probably spend a little more to get a better drive if I were to do it again.

I needed to clean out a lot of stored paper in my office. But much of it couoldn't be destroyed because of the state's records retention schedule. So I opted to digitize as much as I couold, then shred the paper copies. My PC had a writable cd drive. But I didn't want to fool with the paper labels or writing on the discs with a sharpie. So this Lightscribe drive allows me to inscribe a permanent label right onto the disc. The drive set up without any problems - was immediately recognized by XP. The label I designed wasn't tremendoously complex. The drive scribed it onto the disc in a few minutes. Works great.

I encountered a serious problem with this DVD burner. I have a couple of computers and I had a HP DL DVD writer for one, but I wanted another for the second computer. I ran across this one in Amazon sold by one of their 3rd party sellers. I had been using Memorex blank DL DVDs with a HP DVD DL writer and I switched to Kodak blank DL DVDs. It didn't and should not matter that the blank DVDs were either Memorex or Kodak. The HP DL DVD writer did fine with both brands. Then I spotted this DVD writer. I knew it wasn't going to be the top of the line or real fast. I just needed solid functionality. After getting the drive I immediately noted that the Memorex DVD writer experienced problems with writing to the Kodak DL blanks DVDs (if it was able to write to them at all). I tried the writer on both systems and the results were always poor with the Kodak DL blank DVDs. The bottom line is that if you have a DVD DL writer it should be able to use ALL major brands of blank DL DVDs. After mailing the Memorex DVD writer back and getting hit with a very steep restocking fee of 35 percent I will not be buying any Memorex DVD writers or use that 3rd party seller again!

There's a reason this sells for 72% below retail: It's worth about 72% of other burners.Two burners ago I had a Memorex, and loved it. It eventually gave up the ghost and was replaced by a Sony, which wasn't as nice, but did the job. It died last week and this unit is its replacement.To be even, the two previous were 18x burners, while this new one is a 20x. The media I am using are quality Sony DVDs, 18x. Somehow, burning with this new Memorex takes almost twice as long. This and my previous two units are all external USB drives, plugged in to the same port directly on the PC itself. There's no reason for the throughput to be as abysmal as it is, yet all factors remaining constant (not changing media, burning software, etc) it burns an 18x disc in almost *twice* the time of the old Sony and the original Memorex. For new technology to behave poor compared to drives from 5+ years ago is just unacceptable.If you're looking for a cheap replacement or an in-a-pinch stand in, sure. Otherwise, it's not a high quality product. I don't know how they ever charged *more* than $40 for this.

Bought this drive to take the pressure off of the internal drive in my notebook. When it works, it is fast. But many times it errors out and I have to throw away the DVD. I'm using a Vista machine, and I think it's just not that compatible, even after downloading and installing the newest firmware. Probably wouldn't recommend to a friend or buy it again.