Best SATA DVD Burners

Samsung has been in the optical drive market for some time and was one of the first major suppliers to produce SATA burners in mass quantities. The SH-S223Q is their latest SATA DVD writer for desktop computers that offers some fairly impressive speeds. It has some of the best rated access times with 130ms for DVD and 110ms for CD. Recording speeds are also high with 22x for both DVD recordable formats and an impressive 16x speed for DVD+R dual layer media. The drive also supports burning labels directly to Lightscribe compatible media.

Most of the DVD burners sold on the market today are either bare drive or OEM. This means that they only come with the drive and no software, cables or installation hardware. If you require these items when you buy the drive, then the HP DVD 1170i is the kit to get. In addition to the new 1170i drive with its 22x recording speeds, the kit includes instructions, screws, SATA cable and Nero Essentials software. Performance is strong for most tasks but does lag behind in dual layered media recording compared to the top models. The drive does support burning labels directly to LightScribe compatible media.

Double layered DVD media allows for roughly double the storage of traditional DVD media. The problem is that the recording of these discs tends to be much slower. If you are looking for a drive that can record to the DVD+R DL or DVD-R DL media quickly, then the Samsung SH-S223F is the drive of choice. It features 16x and 12x recording speeds respectively for the two media types. If you need to record to traditional single layered DVD media, it features the 22x recording speed. The drive also has some of the best access times out of all the burners currently on the market.

Lightscribe is the most popular of the two different directly labeling systems on burners. While the Samsung ends out the LG drive in performance, the LG GH22LS30 has slightly better recording when it comes to burning labels to LightScribe compatible media. Thus, if burning labels is the key feature to have, it is the drive of choice. Performance is still quite strong with 22x recording for DVD recordable media and 16x for DVD+R dual layer and 12x for DVD-R dual layer. Note that the drive is sold without any software for the label burning process.

Most people who burn data to CDs and DVDs consider them disposable because they are so inexpensive. The problem is that the data once recorded to the media isn't easy to erase, especially with the one time recordable media. Lite-ON has developed a system called SmartErase that allows the drive to make a single use recordable disc become unreadable. So, if data security is highly important to you, the iHAS322-08 drive is certainly the one to consider. The drive has good performance to with its 22x DVD+/-R recording speeds. It is a bit slower for dual-layered media though.