I am a network administrator. I have alot of drivers and useful utilities that I use or share with my clients. My driver and utilities database is very comprehensive and needs to be compiled on as few disk as possible. At this point I would like to purchase a DL burner for data backups and driver/ utilities distribution. I also do remote management of some of my clients servers..ie backing up data from the servers. I need the ability to burn data dvd's accuratley and with the ability to be read by many different CD-Rom drives, in case I have to restore client data from time to time. I can afford to invest whatever I need for a good quality burner. My drivers/utilities DVD's will be on DL media. Client backups will be on DVD-RW disk. I would appreciate any suggestions you folks may have?

I must clarify that I will be restoring data to servers using CD-RW's or DVD-RW's depending upon the client's drive capabilities on the servers.

The problems come with the media type specific.
DVD-R can be read by almost any dvd drive, DVD+R is close behind even the rate goes up when they are bitsetted to DVD-ROM.
Same problematic with -RW & +RW, however setting them to DVD-ROM is not the best choice (IMHO). Some drives won't handle RWs good, some others have none problems.

Thank you for the info chef. Do you have a recomendation for a burner?

First I never would use a DVD writer for backups. I have two external HD (small and normal) with USB2 interface. The notebook type I use for moving data from one location to the other since it is not so fragile. In the worst case a flash drive would be the best solution. But why all this?

DVD writers are very slow. You have to write and you have to verify the data after writing. At a HD you can copy and even CHANGE the data at a very high speed.

The DATA amount on a DVD is limited. My big HD has 250 GB my small 80 GB - do this with DVDs...

DVDs you burn you should not mix up with what you can buy for instance as movies in a shop. They are stamped. What this means is that your burned DVDs are not accepted at all drives. For my Liteon 1693S I found so far only 1 brand/type my notebook drive can read - and I checked a lot. I found this brand/type by accident. Without it I would not be able to read my DVDs on my notebook. Any other media are useless for me. But my notebook is old. So more modern drives should do a better job. But this is not true for DL - here are still big problems for big money ;-) Even RW can be a problem if used on different drives.

For backup I would use HD drives. For distribution I would use normal burned CDs if possible. They are more widely accepted by drives than burned DVDs.

Hard to say, but have a closer look at the reviews of Benq 1640, LG 4167, LiteOn 1693, Nec 3540, Pioneer 110(D), Plextor 716, Samsung 162.

For long-living backups tapes/DAT or HDDs are probably the better choice.