Buying a DVD Burner tomorrow for the first time. Pioneer A06
 

From what I've read this is a good drive. Can anyone suggest something better or am i on the right track?

You can go eyes closed. In France it cost less than 200 $CAN nowaday and it's the best quality/price.

You can also check the Sony drives. Specially the DRX-500 series.
They will do DVD+R DVD+RW DVD-R DVD-RW CD-R CD-RW

-kwag

Pioneer A05
 

I've got a Pioneer A05 that I'm very happy with, so I think you'd like the A06. Although it defaults to 2x when ripping a video DVD (even ones that I've burned myself), an unofficial firmware patch will bring it up to 12x. (It reads non-video DVDs at full speed.)

The A06 appears to be very similar to the A05 (it came out only a few months later), but writes both DVD+R(W) and DVD-R(W) (the A05 only does the '-' formats).

The A05 unfortunately only burns CD-Rs at 16x (and CD-RWs at 8x), so my LG CD burner still lives in this computer. No idea what CD speeds the A06 supports...

The Pioneer A05 sucks and had some bad writeups especially with it being fussy about the CD-R's it would read but im not sure if this was cured with a firmware update.

I had some problems with 90 minute CDs (sometimes it reads them perfectly, sometimes it doesn't even like to read the TOC, but never in between) but since neither my car stereo nor my standalone DVD player like 90 minute discs this isn't a problem for me. But the Pioneer has one advantage over my LG drive: it reads the pregap of track 1 without problems (this helps with some early CD-Extra discs that stored the data section in the pregap for the first track instead of in the second session).

You could be thinking of the A04 (or maybe it was the A03), which could destroy itself using certain types of media under very early revisions of the firmware.

No it was definately the A05 actually the A04 was a better model and more stable, im not saying its utter rubbish just that it has some issues.

However like i said maybe there is a firmware update and these probs have been fixed.