I got my first burner in the year 2000 - Smart & Friendly SCSI. Used it with Windows 98. Dunno if it makes me an early adopter or a semi-early.
My first DVD burner I got in 2004, with a WinXP machine. They were not common back then. I remember I got my first batch of measly 1x DVD-R media from a friend, who had mistakenly bought them thinking they were CD-R, and his burner did not support DVDs.
After that first S&F, I've almost exclusively used LG optical drives, for no particular reason other than they were affordable and abundant. My Win98 machine still has an LG CD-ROM and CD-RW. Briefly it had a DVD-ROM, but it started glitching so I took it out. The Pentium 4 desktop has two LG DVD burners (PATA), and newer desktops have LG BD-RE drives (SATA).
Errius wrote on 2021-08-04, 02:27:I got my first BD-RE drive in 2012, and have bought a new one every few years since then. (They tend to start producing coasters after a couple of years. I keep the old ones around, but don't use them for burning.)
My experience has been different, but no less bizarre - the older BD-RE drives I have read and write BluRay just fine, and CDs as well, but became very finicky in reading DVDs, including pressed ones.
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