I remember buying my first CDROM drive - it was a Mitsumi 1x FX001 CDRom that the entire ‘guts’ slid out just to insert a disk. It was slow, had no software (everything was on floppies at the time), and was generally a piece of garbage.

Flash forward to 2005 - I just plopped a shiny new NEC ND-3520A Dual Layer DVD Burner (yup, that’s 8+ GB if you can find the media) into my Shuttle for $59. There’s a good review here.

One thing that I wanted to make sure of is that I stop burning DVD’s that lock up my home player. There’s a huge difference in the quality of blank DVD’s, so I’d recommend checking out No More Coasters for all the details on what’s good and what’s crap.

I ended up with a 50 spindle of Maxell 8x DVD-R’s (MXLRG03) which the new drive can burn a full DVD in ~5 minutes.