Good drive, noisy with CDs
Written: Jun 21 '00 (Updated Jun 30 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: quality drive, Sony name
Cons: bundled decoder card, noisy when reading CDs
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| cptsulu's Full Review: Sony DVD-ROM Internal Drive (5x) |
I have recently purchased a Sony DVD-ROM drive upgrade kit. The drive itself is a Sony DDU220E 6X DVD-ROM drive. The upgrade kit included a RealMagic Hollywood Plus MPEG decoder card. It included very high quality EIDE/ATAPI channels.
I build and upgrade systems on a regular basis, so installing the drive was extremely easy for me. I didn't even read the manual. I did, however, go through the manual after I installed the drive. The manual is informative and should help newbies install their drives with ease. However, the RealMagic installation documentation was very skimpy. I think their target audience was meant more for techies. Despite this minor problem, detection of my new hardware went flawlessly. It looks as if Sony selected a decoder card that would work well with their DVD drive and not cause conflicts within the system.
DVD playback is superior to the other products I have seen. I can look very closely at my screen and see everything in fine detail.
There are a few things I do not like about this kit though.
I think DVD-ROM drives have to use two lasers to read media. One laser is used for reading DVDs and the other is used for reading CDs. When the drive is reading DVDs, it's peaceful and quiet. On some drives, you can hear the laser actually reading the data. However, when a CD is inserted the second laser is VERY noisy. The sound is much like a Boeing 747 inside your computer.
Also, the RealMagic Hollywood Plus decoder card has some issues on certain systems. For example, mine would not play encrypted DVDs. I asked the tech support and told me to disable the UDF file system on Windows 98. They don't tell you exactly how, expecting you already know how, just like their documentation. So the tech support is also techie oriented. Further, when I upgraded to the 1.8.1 drivers, it messed up my DVD playback. Going back to the 1.6 drivers continued to mess it up. Tech support was not of much help then. So be careful with the RealMagic Hollywood Plus decoder card bundled with the drive.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
cptsulu
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Member: Ryan Samiley
Location: University of California, Irvine
Reviews written: 33
Trusted by: 15 members
About Me:
Third year Information and Computer Science major at UCI.
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