Pros: Cheap I've owned this drive 8 months, and after making lots of coasters I panned it in my first review. However, I recently did some research and corrected some boneheaded mistakes. My drive hasn't made a coaster since.

Cons: N/A. My problem wasn't firmware, drivers, or a manufacturing defect: the drive was fine, t simply wasn't receiving data fast enough. I'm no expert, but here's some tips. Ensure: 1. Your IDE cable/s are 80-pin; 40-pin cables don't support DMA. This was my biggest problem. 2. You don't have DMA disabled in the BIOS. 3. Your IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers are set to "DMA if available" in control panel.

Overall Review: (cont'd) 4. Your hard drive and ihap222 are on different channels. Try mastering the hard drive on 1, and mastering the DVD on 2. 5. Test your transfer speed. I used "Nero CD-DVD Speed" (free program). You'll need a mostly-full disc without copy protection to test-scan. Google your top speed to see if it's consistent with DMA-enabled transfers. 6. First burn your files to an ISO image, so they're contiguous on the hard drive and can be read faster. 7. Try burning with "InfraRecorderPortable" (a free, open-source program). Try a sub-maximum speed. My current settings: 14x speed, Session-At-Once, buffer underrun protection, pad data tracks, close the disc after writing. I've got everything on the "advanced" tab unchecked. NOTE: My drive still doesn't recognize the discs it burns; I dunno why. I likely still have something configured wrong. My other computer reads them fine, however. Hope this helps somebody :)

Pros: None

Cons: With Memorex and Verbatim DVD+R discs, it burns a coaster about one out of every two times. Firmware update didn't help. Never again.