Cyberdrive DM168 16x48x dvd rom drive.
My dad bought me this the other day and to be honest I was not expecting much from a drive that cost £30 inc from Novatech
The drive was also RPC1 region free by default, dvd rom region info verified this and nero info tool.
So, all bonuses there I decided to try out the noise level on dvd and cd roms as my old pioneer slot loader 16x40x was very loud in normal mode thus had to manually set it to quiet mode halfing its speeds all round.
I was happy to see that the drive is quiet in both modes and it is silent when watching media cd's (dvd etc), its also pretty fast during pickup and transfer from cd to disk.
I tried Road kill DVD (region 2) to test image quality and such, after inserying the dvd i tried nvdvd 1.7 and windvd platinum, set te region mode to 2 as prompted by windvd and while the dvd was in the drive all diag apps noted the drive as "rpc2 region 2" which is fine, take the dvd out and its rpc 1 again, the drive is totally rpc1
image quality through the drive and searching/chapter changing was smooth and nice, again all silent during the process.
Image quality : http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robbiekhan ... _captures/
I also ripped parts of the Road Kill dvd to divx to see how fast and stable it was, all went fine and fast there too.
My pioneer dvd is ata66 but this one is ata33 however, I noticed no difference between transfer speed or usage speed over the ata66 on the pioneer so that part can be put aside.
It is also connected to the same cable as my LG cdrw drive as slave, the pioneer would not accept sharing a cable!!! - cd copying on the fly fro drive to drve was also faultless using buffer underun I was able to do other things while burning without problem
So, conclusion? - very cheap dvd drive from an unheard of maker to most turned out to be very good and on the whole it's better than my pioneer 106/s slot loader which was in retrospect a visually nice drive rather a well performing one!
Muchos happy with this drive because it was more than expected and higher spec. If anyone here comes accross one at the shops and is in the market for dvd drive then go for it! It's a great drive and don't let an unheard of make put you off because After seraching google with the name It was clear CyberDrive have been in optical technology for some years now!
Happy Chappy
