This Hi-Val DVD-ROM Drive can be bought for under $100 now. It is an EIDE drive, so you don’t have to buy a SCSI card and spend your time trying to make it work. The kit includes IEDE cable and the drive, there is no hardware MPEG decoder.

The decoding is performed by the software, so make sure your computer is powerful enough for this duty. The drive is manufactured by Pioneer and reads DVDs at 12x (hence the name HDVD12A-16R) and CDs at 40x.

The movies look nice when played on this drive (once again, make sure that your computer can handle the encoding), and there is no skipping/freezing. The drive is also quite quiet (unless you put an unbalanced CD in).

With 16x DVD reading speed, this EIDE drive is very fast. The DVD-ROM employs the try for loading, so there is no need to mess with caddies.

Since there is no hardware MPEG decoder card, the installation is quite simple and straightforward. I would recommend that you put the drive on its own channel (as secondary master) and avoid putting it on one channel with your hard drive (primary master HD, primary slave DVD). This way you will get better performance.

It’s nice that DVD drives don’t cost as much as they used to and provide such an easy installation an performance level.


Recommended: Yes