I have had two Panasonic drives, the UJ-812 and UJ-845. Both weren't that great. The both had high error rates at the ends of discs and experienced playback issues. The 812 in particular wouldn't burn any discs rated higher than 2x. As was noted earlier, notebook drives as not as good as desktop drives. I got a NEC 6500 and external case for use with my ThinkPad which only uses Panasonic drives cause they are the only ones who make the super slim drives.