Internal optical drive for WaveLab Pro 9 - recommendations?

WaveLab
1

Yes, I still need to burn CDs! I’m aware that the standard recommendations of the past no longer apply, and that the flagship manufacturer no longer makes good drives. I have a pair of ageing Plextors but they no longer perform well in WaveLab since I upgraded to a Z170 mainboard, even with BIOS tweaks.

I’m interested mainly in error-free write performance, but read performance can be important. The Plextors seem to have difficulty reading CD/DVDs with large numbers of files with the Z170. I’ve ruled out both WaveLab and the Gear drivers, it seems to be something to do with the drive/chipset combination (i.e. they worked fine with the older mainboard, same OS, WL version), and there is no newer firmware available. I think they are only 1.5Gb/s SATA and the Z170 is 6Gb/s.

At the moment I’m looking at the BW-16D1HT Blu-Ray writer, on the basis that I could also use it for high-capacity long-term archival (Blu-Ray data disc), but audio CD performance is the priority. So, can anyone recommend please a currently available internal SATA drive, based on actual experience in use with WaveLab 9?

2

Well, my personal machine is still Windoze 7 Professional (I see you are on 10 pro) but we have had pretty good success with Pioneer drives (three so far). We still have Plextools running on an old XP machine and the write seems to be robust.

That said, rarely do I burn a CD from WL … typically, mainly for quality control purposes, the DDP that is generated in WL is then opened and burned from Sonoris. Never had any issues with burning from Sonoris or HOFA using Pioneers.

Good luck!