Advice and Deals on CD-ROM / DVD-ROM Drives

There is no longer a need to buy a plain, CD-ROM only drive. My advice is to go for a DVD-ROM drive which will also read CD-ROM discs as well. It is just a little bit more in price, but well worth it.

Even better, you might want to consider a CD burner drive or DVD burner drive. I recommend checking out those sections first if you have not done so already.

For DVD playback, you will need either a DVD decoder card or DVD software player. Windows, as far as I am aware of, does not have built-in DVD playback in its Media Player. Fortunately, DVD software usually comes bundled with the DVD-ROM drive. The two most popular DVD playback software titles are Cyberlink's PowerDVD and Intervideo's WinDVD.

You may be wondering what is the purpose for a DVD decoder card and if one is necessary. The main purpose of a DVD decoder card is to let the hardware do the decoding rather than the CPU. This frees up the CPU to do other tasks. A DVD decoder card is not required if the CPU is relatively fast. Opinion on what the minimum is varies -- I say at least a 500 MHz or faster processor. Anything less should use a DVD decoder card or better yet, be upgraded to a faster computer.

With that said, here are the top deals and current rebates on DVD-ROM drives:

DVD Drives
AOpen DVD1648PA IDE DVD-ROM Drive - 16X DVD-ROM, 8X DVD±R, 8X DVD±RW, 48X CD-ROM
Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM ATAPI/E-IDE Drive - 16x DVD-ROM, 48x CD-ROM