After much hair pulling, I decided to get the Plextor 708. It's got DVD +/- R/RW at 8x speed. After mail-in rebate, it's $115 from Newegg. The main reason I chose it over the competition is that it comes loaded with all kinds of useful software (Nero, Pinacle Studio, etc.) which would have cost me much more to buy at retail. Yeah, it doesn't do dual layer, but all the cheap media is single-layer right now. I can always get something fancier later on.