Current ASUS CRW-5232 CD burners and Combo drives

[stix]

Although my Yamaha F1 still performs Great and I'm very happy with it, I am looking into purchasing a second CD burner for a 2nd system. Based on Ian's review here at CDRLabs I am leaning toward the ASUS CRW5232AS with QuietTrack, since it appears to be a great performer and is relatively Quiet. Quiet is important to me. I have looked at Newegg, and they list a variety of CD burners from ASUS. It is not entirely clear to me which models include the Quiet Track features, or whether they all do at this point. Listed are: ASUS: CRW-5232AS, CRW-5232A/QT (bad Newegg buyer reviews), CRW5232A3 (looks like more advanced features including Mt Rainier support, from what I can read about the drive at ASUS web site), CRW-5232AX. Can anyone around here help clarify which drive is the newest, best, AND includes QuietTrack? What about the combo drive ASUS CB-5216A and the ASUS-5216A/QT, anyone know this drive or able to recommend it? Any other thoughts on this topic? I just bought the BenQ DW1640, but my thinking is to use CD burners to burn CDs, and now that I have a DVD burner I'll use that only for burning DVDs. I have a separate DVD-ROM drive for loading software, reading CDs and DVDs etc. Is this the conventional wisdom or is it overkill?


Newegg page referred to above:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=Browse&Manufactory=1315&Subcategory=5

[Gabe]

The most drives are quiet, if you don´t burn fast.

Hm, Asus-CD-RW-drives have often problems with writing-quality on some media. I have a 4816, it performs from very well to absoluty worse, depending on used media.

CDRInfo made a new review of the S-ATA-CD-RW 5232A-T nad it performs only well on some media.

Maybe you take a look on an AOpen-drive. LiteOn is not to recommend because their drives are very loud and the noise have an unpleasant frequency

[Scour]

Hello!

I recommend LG. Not very loud, good writing-quality.

[Ian]

I haven't used some of ASUS's newer CD-RW's but I liked the CRW-5232AS with QuietTrack. The CRW-5232A3 seems to be the most recent version of their QuietTrack enabled CD-RW. The CRW-5232AX looks very similar. Maybe the OEM version of the CRW-5232A3?

If you already own a BenQ DW1640, I wouldn't bother buying another CD-RW. The BenQ is more than adequate when writing CD's.

[stix]

thanks Gabe, Scour, and Ian for your help on this topic.