Pioneer DVR-XU01 External DVD Writer: First Thoughts

Even though I use a laptop, and nobody really needs optical discs anymore these days — discs are old and stupid, after all.

But back in the day, I thought optical discs were something utterly cool and aloof.

I remember as a kid, every weekend I’d go to the local pirate-market to dig through discs. Buying pirated copies isn’t exactly something to be proud of, but back then I couldn’t even find where the legit software stores were, and with games costing 79 RMB a pop in the legit era, you just had to accept reality.

At the time I thought a single disc held a ridiculous amount — a crappy floppy only held 1.38 MB (even though it says 1.44 MB). I was especially envious of people who had CD burners. In my eyes, that was basically infinite mass storage.

But times moved on. Later, Combo drives came along, burners became common, and burning discs was no big deal anymore.

Then broadband became widespread, more and more games no longer fit on one or two CDs, and DVDs started appearing. Looking at DVD capacity, I felt DVDs were the future — if you could burn DVDs, that had to be even more massive storage than burning CDs.

But soon DVDs weren’t enough either. A single movie started hitting 7 GB, and a lousy DVD only holds 4.7 GB.

Only then did we get Blu-ray, but for me, Blu-ray never really caught on — give it a few years and something even better than Blu-ray will show up. In the end, none of it beats buying hard drives for storage. A NAS plus broadband solves most problems, and optical discs look a bit awkward in that regard.

But for me, I still have a bit of an optical drive soft spot — that’s why I always keep a burner in the home computer. A few years back I even bought a Blu-ray burner, though I’ve only used it a handful of times.

Even with a laptop, I always kept an external burner around, just in case. But soon enough, that HP external burner I’d kept went missing, so I had no choice but to buy another one. Relying on my good impression of Pioneer, I picked up a Pioneer DVR-XU01 on JD:

Delivery was fast as always, but I have to say there’s a bit of a letdown — the build quality isn’t very refined, the corners are misaligned all over, and it’s pure plastic. I thought it’d be metal. Feels pretty flimsy.

The front panel is a bit crooked too. But looking online, most burners are like this unless you’re willing to spend big on ones with good build quality — and for a burner, what the hell good does build quality do?

I tried burning a disc, using Nero Linux — no longer updated, but still the best burning software. The disc was a BIOS update disc for the X250. Speed was satisfying, though thinking about it, it’s a bit awkward — apart from this, the only use I’ll probably have for this drive is burning Windows install discs.

Oh right, ripping discs might still be useful. As a music lover, thinking about that makes me feel somewhat comforted — though who knows when digital music will completely revolutionize optical discs.