Advice on new Pioneer optical drive purchase

[DennisOlof]

I know that Pioneer have ceased production and I want to buy a Pioneer drive because I have used them in the past.
I will have to buy from Ebay and most of the driver are located in China. Somewhere in the forums there was
talk about fake devices but I am unsure of how you know if a unit is genuine or not.

The device will be used for backup of personal data on quality media. I use mechanical harddrive now for bulk storage
of mostly unimportant data but some data I want to put on optical media for additional backup protection
in case something goes wrong with the harddrives. I am unsure what drive I should buy because I have no clue what
the difference is between different Pioneer drives. These are the drives that seem readily available from sellers
on Ebay. If I want LibreDrive support I am going to get another bluray drive for that use only.

Can I buy a drive elsewhere, what drives do you recommend, have I overlooked a model ?

These are the one I could find that have a resonable price

BDR-S12XJ (BDR-S12JX)
BDR-S12JBK
BDR-212DBK

[GeorgeMech]

I’m in the same boat.

The sentiment seems to be eBay Is a dice roll with scammers but eBay is pretty good about siding with the customer and idk where else I would find an s12jx except eBay

In a few days I’ll know if the s11jx I ordered is in fact an s11jx.

I believe to determine if the drive is what it says it is you open mkv insert a disc into the drive and the drive area populates with what kind of drive and firmware it has.

[DennisOlof]

Ha, I will reply to my own thread.

Forgot about this but yeah I manage to get my hands on a Pioneer BDR-XD08MB-S drive, it can not rip UHD discs but that is not a problem. Anyway it was not kind to my bank account. When all was said and done the total cost was about 450 euros. The device was genuine.

I would stay way from Chinese sellers. The biggest problem with Ebay is that you don't know, yes a drive can look legit but you can not be sure the pictures they post are real pictures. A lot of sellers reuse other sellers pictures and use them as their own. Also some of the units are way to cheap compared to what it should be as there is not much Pioneer drives left now. The biggest give away that a drive is fake is the manufacture date. I laugh when I see say a BDR-209DBK drive that the sticker claim is made in 2022 or 2023. No way it is real because that drive was out of production going back some time. Most of them are also missing that tiny white sticker with number on it, they only have the large printed badge on it.

Some of the drives could be genuine but there are so many Chinese sellers that are pushing fake drives or putting on a re-badge on them.

If you can communicate with a seller and they can provide you with their own pictures etc then that is a more safe choice but most of them are often private sellers and might not do shipping world wide.