new review added: NEC ND-3520A... Check it out here.

Oooooooooo.

(in reply to kogos)

Finally

(in reply to Iggy)

The drive looks great, but I don't see that it is better than the Plextor drive, so I'll stick with it for now.

(in reply to emperor)

Great reveiw but Plextor 716 here I come.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

[Deleted by Admins]

(in reply to kojak71)

Hi,

Bought one of these last week. I shall let you know how it performs once I burn a few more discs. So far DVD-r 4x have been very good.

(in reply to Deleted User)

Gr8t.

icstm, let us know about the sound levels aswell. Previous model ND-3500 was horrific.. (always max rev no matter what media it read..)
It sounded like a dish washer machine...

ND-2500 though was vispering quiet.

(in reply to icstm)

I think the operation noise depends at what your main use would be...For example, when writing at 16X, the drive will produce noise, its fairly quiet at 4X/8X, as for the reading part, you could force its reading at 1X/2X

(in reply to Silvershark)

Yes trouble with ND 3500 though was that it always read CD and DVD's att full speed making a terrible noise.

This was no matter of what was read, CD, DVD, CD audio - it would spin up max even if the disk was touched in Explorer - and keep on spinning..

Felt to me like som bad piece but tried several versions, several Nec players on several motherboards and always the same problem..

ND-2500 was much nicer, only spinning up when it actually needed and spinning down quite fast if it found it didn't need too.
(for example playing dvd or cd audio)

So that kept me wondering if the ND-3520 had this problem fixed.

(in reply to emperor)

no much fixes at that part, sorry

(in reply to Silvershark)

3520 is very quiet drive.
Sometimes I just wondering is it work.
Very good drive, just NEC must improve reading abilities.
With reading I'm not satisfied.

(in reply to emperor)

quote:

ORIGINAL: scorpio

3520 is very quiet drive.
Sometimes I just wondering is it work.
Very good drive, just NEC must improve reading abilities.
With reading I'm not satisfied.

In what why does it underperfom when reading? Any specific medium?

(in reply to scorpio)

I have NEC 3500A and it has a loud terrible noise when reading DVDs or other media, avoiding me from playing music or movies directly from my drive. I have alway copied them to the harddrive first. But today I discovered that Nero Burning Rom has a tool called Drivespeed which allows you to set a reading speed for DVDs and CDs. I tried it, and set it on 5 for DVDs, which works perfectly. Ofcourse the optimum would be if it could be set as a variable speed, so when powering up it goes to maximum speed and then spins down to 1 or 5. That way the movie would start much faster and then read at an optimal speed without significant noise. However, it is possible to directly play around with different speeds while reading a media. You can set it on 1 and then on 18 and back to 1. The DVD instantly spins up and down beautifully. Nero Drivespeed is a great tool. If you don't have Nero installed already, you can find Nero Drivespeed here.

(in reply to Silvershark)