New owner of a Sony DRX 500UL

[schuang74]

OK so I bit the bullet and bought a Sony DRX 500UL. I am a true tech junkie, and I just had to have this drive. Anyhow I wanted to get the 500ULX, but no one seemed to have those in stock except Sony Online. After reading through some posts here, I still had a few newbie questions:

1. So after upgrading to the 1.0g firmware then my drive should be identical to the 500ULX?

2. Would you reccomend using + or - media?

3. How long does it take to burn a full 4.7 Gigs of data on the (+ or -)R and RW disks?

4. How long before my dirve becomes the slowest drive on the block (i.e. when are faster drives expected to come out)?

I love this drive by the way, any opinions from anyone else?

[HyperYagami]

1. So after upgrading to the 1.0g firmware then my drive should be identical to the 500ULX?

from the usability pt of view, yes

2. Would you reccomend using + or - media?

they're basically no different from user's point of view. I'd pick - because it's cheaper.

3. How long does it take to burn a full 4.7 Gigs of data on the (+ or -)R and RW disks?

1x = approx. 1hr. so you can do the math.

4. How long before my dirve becomes the slowest drive on the block (i.e. when are faster drives expected to come out)?

maybe another 6 months or so.

[Dartman]

If you use the + media its around 20 minutes to do a single layer movie, thats what my a model did with the included +rw media. the plus is 2.4 by design. the - stuff is slower unless you find some 2X or faster somewhere.
1x is about an hour but so far evrything I've tried has worked.
If you doing movies you'll have to see what your player can handle, some can only do - some can do + some can do both, but only in movie mode.
I have a little portable Koss 216 player that seems to read any media I burn so far and can see MP3's in folders and play them on dvd media of both types too.
My other units can't do that little trick