I'm looking for some "real-world" recommendations for CD burners. I have two boxes, neither of which have a burner at the moment (both do have regular CD-ROMs). My primary machine is a P-III 500, on which I run various flavors of Linux, Mandrake 8.0 being the most-used right now. The second box is a P-II 400, running Win 98 and Rh 6.2 (although I'll be installing newer distros on that soon). Neither have SCSI; the P-III is ATA-66, and the P-II is ATA-33. Both also have a Promise PCI ATA-100 controller card.

So, my question are:

What is the best CD-RW to buy for one or both of these systems. Plextor's drives come highly recommended from Windows users, but how well are they supported under Linux? If a Plextor, which model will perform equally well under Linux and Win98? Are there issues with using any manufacurer's drive on my ATA-100 controller?

My main needs would be burning downloaded ISO images of distros to CD, creating ISO-9660s, and making audio (redbook) CDs.

TIA, any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Any good quality ATAPI IDE CD-RW will work under linux. The Lite-On brand have been getting good reviews and are about 1/2 the price of Plexors. I have an Acer 4x4x32 and a Lite-On 12x10x32 at the moment.

I have a Memorex 16x10x40 BurnProof, and that works very well. On the case of the Promise ATA card - does yours work alright? I've got my Zip250 drive attached (as the only device, hde) and although I can read from it, and write to it, the moment I umount it, the whole bloody lot of Linux goes down (literally, there's no key-presses I've found to get out of it).

Oh, just found the RH 'drivers' on the Promise website. Will try them tonight.

I am gonna put a new box together, all linux, soon. Am interested mainly in the Plextor 16x RW drive. Maximum PC recently reviewed that drive as the "best RW drive ever tested".
Course, they test under windoze, so hopefully will be no problems under linux.

the new Philips CD-RWs are good and are cheap, they have Burn Proof, Just-Link, and TBW(thermo balance writing) not many have those, although many dont like Philips, i trusted her twice and no problems either windows or Linux.

lemme give props to the HP 8260 USB external writers!

I needed a CD burner I could move from work or home, and between machines at work even. These work great.

They're USB which means that they're *much* slower than ATAPI and SCSI. Mine has a max burn of 4x and read of 6x. I usually burn at 2x to avoid any errors.

The USB burners are easy to configure. Just plug in and 'modprobe usb-storage' on a stock RH 7.2 install and you're good to go.

If you only burn CDs occaisonally and don't mind the speed, check out USB.