Best Blu-ray burner?
 

What is the best comvo CD/DVD/BD burner?
Highest quality burns, reliable tests, nice option would be, if it was capable of properly reading damaged CDs, or old CD-Rs.

SCSI drives are welcome.

Pioneer and LG make the currently highest rated combo CD/DVD/BluRay burners, with Pioneer being the highest rated. LG can also read DVD-RAM discs, the Pioneer cannot (if DVD-RAM is an issue, but it is not a widely used disc type). I have used LG burners for years with no problems. No optical drive can read discs that are badly damaged. Pioneer and LG have corrective circuitry that will make the best effort they can in a consumer machine.

Often you can recover data from a damaged disc using the ISOBuster application on a PC. More serious disc damage can be repaired only as described by lordsmurf using RTI machines ($8000 USD) or through a disc repair service.

The burning software is also an important factor. Highly recommended is the free ImgBurn utility.

I have 2 DVD drives from both, but no BD, I use LG currently for EAC.

I have some CD-Rs released by artists and labels and one really gets on my nerves, as it does not want to rip the last track, though the errors sometimes appears from trac 8, sometimes not...

My favorite CD and DVD LiteOn IHAS and Pioneer.
LG`s and Comby DVD + BR because I have only tested the combustion quality.
Am not satisfied.

Pioneer I have because he for new firmware also DVD-RAM can write here.
He makes here several years his work properly

Hab ripped many CDs only a few days ago.
Absolutely no problem with Audiograbber. [Ancient program]
IMPORTANT The "FreeDB" is
then get all the clips the right name

Here the grabbing is allowed.
But is prohibited when I show an image here

Pioneer for burning, LiteOn for scanning. I have one of each.
LG is blah.
Remember to use quality media. Though note that BD seems to be more forgiving than DVD. It's almost like CD here.

I need the best BD combo to burn CD-Rs only, the DVD and BD is to read factory made music releases, not for data backup.

What about Plextor PX-B950SA?

Good software and good blank media is what you will be looking for, IMGBURN works with almost any burner you buy, Bad blanks what makes the burn fails, I upgraded my laptop BD player with an after market Matshita BD burner and never had a problem, After years of burning I learned that Verbatim is the best among the blank media I've used for the last few years, never had a single coaster with them the second distant one is TDK, IMGBURN/Verbatim is the combination that worked for me for years for both 25GB and 50GB blanks, Even if I use authoring software I burn to an image on the hard drive and have IMGBURN burn the image to the disc, 100% guaranteed this way.

Thank you for advice.

Yet, as I have written, I my burning would be limited to Audio CD-Rs, but I need DVD and BD read feature, writing is optional.

Most modern Blu-ray player drives burn CD's and DVD's with no problem just look for the price that fits your budget, if you are upgrading your laptop make sure to find the one that you can transfer the face plate and mount it on the new one. Why wouldn't you consider a Blu-ray burner, they are cheap now and the media getting even cheaper, I know a lot of folks use it for music storage, I myself bought a BDXL burner that burns 100GB blanks, they are around $12 a disc, I put my entire FLAC music collection in one disc, Pawtec is the most expensive, other brands could be cheaper:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pawtec-Ultra...4AAOSwp5JWV1BL

Desktop ones are the cheapest:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-LG-Elect...AAAOSwhkRWe5L3

No laptop.
A full high-towe work station with ancient devices, like 5,25" floppy, or tape drives, scsi, etc.
I'm on the hunt for an industrial mobo that would have isa slot, or support for two floppy drives at the same time, yet would be able to wotk with 64bit win7 and have decent i7 and proper amount of ram, because biulding a small rack-mounted server is too expensive...
However a nice linux cluster might be the solution...

I don't keep music on CD-Rs, I want to make an underground quasi-label to distribute live recordings of local band, with permission.
And to make single-copy versions of digital only releases to stand on shelf next to factory made.
I'm old-fashioned.

Besides, flac sucks, I don't like compression either, wave for me.

There is no compression on the FLAC it is lossless, it's like a zip file, the FLAC player unzips the FLAC file on the fly and plays the exact original version of the CD, if you decide to burn back to the CD it will reproduce the exact same copy that was once ripped from the original CD, It is the perfect way of storing your CD collection while keeping the exact same quality and have the convenience of taking it with you on the road using a FLAC compatible player (I use my iPhone 6 with a 24bit DAC mounted inside the dash using lightening connector). As far as drive type, I'm an old guy too and I'm not into SCSI and floppy drives anymore, I'm a USB 3.0 and SATA guy, I found it cheaper to stick with the current technology, while keeping the speed and performance at the optimum level. I use old technology for archiving purposes only, Such as professional VCR's, turntables, audio cassette players and so on.

Same here for archiving.
I'm more into cassette tapes now, though.
As for new technology, I'll be getting a 2tb WD black, my current PC has WinXP32, so it cannot handle GPT, so no more than 2TB...

My next toy will be a HDV/MiniDV deck, They are getting obsolete and it will come a time where it is hard to find a player to playback or back up HDV/miniDV tapes to a modern media storage, I sold my HDV camcorder 3 years ago and I have some HDV and MiniDV tapes left and I have no player for them now, There is two types of HDV format, 1080i and 1080p in two different standards 60i/30p and 50i/25p, My tapes are only 60i/30p, However I will try to find a deck or a camcorder that plays all, The good thing about HDV/DV is you don't have to have a state of the art player to play them back, because it's all digital just like DCC and D-VHS.

It would be a lot easier if 8mm tape streamers, like Eliant could read the digital data off it, like DDS streamer can read DAT, at least some of them can...
I still try to hunt down some streamers in decent quality, that won't cost me an arm and a leg...

You must be talking about Digital 8 because Video8 and Hi8 are analogue formats, I think if the player has IEEE1394 or iLink commonly known as firewire any software should work such as CapDVHS and WinDV.

All those formats are 8mm, the same cassette has been used as backup marketed as Exabyte tapes, the streamer was called Eliant.
And it's a shame that it cannot read at least Digital8, I wonder if it would be possible to write custom firmware and drivers to flash it to be able to read Digital8 as well as analog tapesand use one of those programs to save the memories from those tapes...

I'm too young for firewire tough, but from what I've heard it might be usefull, I have one on my old PC, so one day maybe I will use it, I thought if I could connect a cluster using firewire instead of lan.

I see, you are talking about backup to a tape and I'm talking about transfer tapes to a computer, I have no idea about the backup systems that you are talking about but It would be a lot cheaper to backup to optical media or solid state drive.

I was reffering to backup device that uses the same cassette as Digital8, Hi8 and Video8 and thought if it was possible to transfer the tapes to computer using such drive, instead of dedicated player, cable, video card, software conversion...

Optical media are flawed, the ydecompose rapidly.

SSDs are even worse, flash memory degrades after certain amount of read/write cycles.

The best method to archive data is MAgneto-Optical disc, but it's also bloody expensive.

Tapes are more reliable than optical media when it comes to backup.
2,5TB is the capacity of LTO-6 tape, BD can store up to 100GB.

LTO drives are over $1500, Parts and service are even more expensive, Optical media may not last long but if you back up lets say every five years you will be safe, I have pictures, music and home videos that I kept safe for over 15 years with less than $50 in optical media and $70 the cost of 2 drive upgrades. If you run a corporation that's a different story but for small business or home use LTO is just waste of money.

Indeed, reliable, but expensive.
So they are targeted at large companies, who can afford one, even then, they have one drive for the whole company.