Top 5 CD and DVD Burners

As a pretty quick dual layer burner, the BenQ's already a pretty good deal. However, BenQ sweetens the deal by including HP's Lightscribe technology. In short, you don't need to worry about applying disc labels anymore. Simply turn a Lightscribe disc upside down in the drive and the laser inside the burner will etch your label for you. The BenQ also has impressive support for various formats, reading and burning both DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW.

If you don't need to burn DVDs but would like to have the ability to run DVD-ROMs, Lite-On's combo drive can be a great way to save money and space in your PC. The Lite-On's write speeds are good, averaging around 52X for CD-R and 32X for CD-RW. It might not be as feature packed as others, but with Lite-On's renowned reliability it's a great choice.

Just want a cheap CD burner with no frills? Then the AOpen Chameleon is just what you need. While it won't cost you more than $30 or so, the Chameleon doesn't sacrifice capability for cost. With the 52x read speads and 32x write speed, AOpen's Chameleon has the performance to rival drives costing twice as much.

Here we have Hewlett Packard's flagship DVD burner. As might be expected, the 640i performs almost identically to the BenQ drive in most respects. However, the major difference between the two drives is the HP 640i's superior performance in burning labels using the Lightscribe technology, which comes as no surprise. Whether or not it justifies the additional cost is an individual judgement call.

Want to burn DVD-RWs rather than the more expensive Dual Layer discs and do it incredibly quickly? If your computer uses a SATA connection for internal drives, this is the drive you want. Plextor's widely known for the quality of their burners, and the PX-12SA is no exception. Although it's packed with features, the most useful is its 8MB "cache" which allows more data to be stored for the drive, which helps to eliminate the dreaded "buffer underrun" errors.