THIRD PURCHASE: CD-RW Drive
All reviews by Bruce Brown PC Magazine
Along with eating broccoli, making backup copies of our critical data tops off the list of things we know are good for us but we avoid anyway. This task is especially important for home-based workers, who don't have the luxury of an IT staff to back up the central servers--and who have no one to complain to when the system crashes and data is lost. For telecommuters, the only way to increase the chances of making backups is probably to buy an external drive. Our favourites are CD-RW drives, since they are both affordable and easy to use. The fact that you can use them to burn your own music CDs is a great bonus as well.
A single CD can hold 650MB of data, which should be fine for most workers. You'll be storing only data files on them; operating-system, utility, and application files can always be restored from the originals if disaster strikes. CD-RW drives are available in internal and external versions with parallel, SCSI, and USB interfaces. We tested three external drives with USB interfaces--the easiest to install and move between PCs, but also the slowest.
At AU$599, the Acer CRW 4406EU has the advantage of being the lowest-priced of the models we tested, and it was the fastest at burning a 170MB image and a hierarchal directory structure. When we tested it with few available system resources, however, the 4406EU couldn't complete the data-burning tests. As with the other two units we tested, the 4406EU entry includes Adaptec's DirectCD utility for making copies of existing CDs. It also includes Adaptec's EasyCD Creator wizard-based software that walks you though the process of creating CDs.
The HP CD-Writer 8200e (AU$499) has rounded edges and a two-tone, white-and-gray case with dark blue plastic inserts. In contrast to the Acer unit, which looks fairly industrial, the 8200e has the style of a consumer appliance. As with the Iomega Predator, the CD-Writer 8200e includes MusicMatch Jukebox for downloading, organising, and playing music files. It also has a utility for converting MP3 files to WAV format for playback on any CD player. The 8200e placed in the middle among the three CD-RWs we reviewed for how fast it wrote test tracks, but it was much faster (relatively speaking, that is) at reading tracks. Of the two drives that were able to write CDs with high CPU overhead (the Iomega Predator was the other one), the 8200e was significantly faster in those conditions.
The Iomega Predator (AU$649) is the most stylised of the units, resembling a portable CD player--not a computer peripheral. It, too, comes with the Adaptec utilities for creating and copying CDs. In our tests, the Predator was the slowest at writing and reading data; the difference was particularly noticeable in CPU overhead mode, in which the Predator took almost twice as long to write data tracks as the 8200e.
Acer CRW 4406EU
Company: Acer Australia
Ph: 02 8762 3000
Price: AU$599
Rating:
HP CD-Writer 8200e
Company: Hewlett-Packard Australia
Ph: 13 13 47
Price: AU$499
Rating:
Iomega Predator
Company: Iomega Australia
Ph: 02 9925 7700
Price: AU$649
Rating:
7%
3%
