All my old Yamaha SCSI CDRW drives died. The old 426 and 4416, IIRC. It has made me anxious about dieing RW drives.
As I mentioned in my original post, I don't really have a rational reason for preferring the Pioneer drives. I've had good experiences with them so far, and Apple used them as their OEM drives in a lot of machines, so maybe that's why.
Whatever one's preference, now is probably the time to stock up on a couple of the latest, last models of PATA DVD-RW drives, if one is planning to keep old PCI machines around for a while. Obviously won't do much good on pre-pci machine, expect, perhaps the few (one?) that have an IDE bus. Although, I've thought about but never tested a SCSI-IDE adapter on a PATA DVD-RW drive. I'll have to give that a try some time.
As I mentioned in my original post, I don't really have a rational reason for preferring the Pioneer drives. I've had good experiences with them so far, and Apple used them as their OEM drives in a lot of machines, so maybe that's why.
Whatever one's preference, now is probably the time to stock up on a couple of the latest, last models of PATA DVD-RW drives, if one is planning to keep old PCI machines around for a while. Obviously won't do much good on pre-pci machine, expect, perhaps the few (one?) that have an IDE bus. Although, I've thought about but never tested a SCSI-IDE adapter on a PATA DVD-RW drive. I'll have to give that a try some time.