Burn, Baby, Burn - Reviews - Hardware - Storage

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Burn, Baby, Burn

September 03, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hardware/storage/soa/Burn-Baby-Burn/0,139023427,120107832,00.htm

Iomega The CD-RW drive is the peripheral du jour, and if you don't have one of these devices hooked up to your system, you're missing out on a whole lot of fun and function. For starters, CD-RW drives can store up to 650MB worth of sound, digital images, video, and text on a single CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) or CD-Recordable (CD-R) disk. Best of all, the CDs you create can be distributed and played in just about any CD-ROM drive.

In addition to providing a flexible, long-term storage solution, these drives can also turn you into a desktop DJ: You can mix your favourite songs onto disks for parties, the car, your Walkman, whatever. You can even download music from the Internet and save it to a CD-R disk that works in just about any audio CD player. These drives write to two separate types of media: CD-R disks, which are inexpensive, write-once media that are ideal for custom music mixes; and CD-RWs, which cost around AU$6 and let you rewrite disk contents as often as you like.

We take a look at four CD-RW drives from Creative Labs, Iomega, Micro Solutions and Ricoh. Before you buy one of these drives, be sure your PC is up to the challenge. If you own an older Pentium PC, it may be too slow to keep up with the CD-burning process. For best results, most CD-RW drives require at least a 166MHz Pentium, but a Pentium II or better will provide greater reliability.

Burn, but Don't Meltdown
Creating custom disks is great fun, but the burning process isn't 100 percent foolproof. From time to time you'll experience glitches while making CDs, which can lead to wasted time and money. Here are a few CD-recording tips:

Defragment your hard disk before you burn your disk.

Have plenty of free hard disk space--as much as 700MB.

Don't run other software while your CD software is creating a disk.

Deactivate any screen savers.

Creative Labs CD-RW Blaster 8432
Iomega ZipCD
Micro Solutions Backpack Bantam CD-ReWriter
Ricoh MP9060A

Creative Labs CD-RW Blaster 8432x

Since the CD-RW Blaster 8432 is an internal drive that requires you to open your PC and fiddle around with IDE cables and jumper settings, we were dismayed to find no quick-start guide in the box. And even though the manual is well written, setup is unnecessarily complex. For instance, the installer asks you to identify which IDE port the drive is connected to, a potentially confusing step for novices.

Once we got everything installed and configured, we learned that this drive is fast, but not as fast as its 8x rating suggests. ("x" ratings signify write speed; an 8x CD-RW transfers data eight times faster than playback speed.) If you plan on making numerous CDs, these extra minutes tend to add up quickly.

The centrepiece of this drive's software package is Nero, an intuitive, wizard-based CD burner interface that lets you create audio and data CDs easily. Extras in the box include both CD-R and CD-RW media, as well as a marking pen for labelling your disks. Disk-labelling software, however, is conspicuously absent from this bundle.

Creative Labs CD-RW Blaster 8432x
Company: Creative Labs
Ph: 02 9666 6100; Fax: 02 9666 6900
Price: AU$399.

Iomega ZipCD

During the 1990s, Iomega made its 100MB Zip disk a ubiquitous household commodity, second only in popularity to the floppy disk. Due to some serious technological limitations, however, Iomega's ZipCD CD-RW drive isn't likely to hold the same sort of sway in the recordable CD space.

This smart-looking external USB drive catches your attention twice: First, with its vivid purple colouring; second, with recording times that lagged far behind the other drives in this roundup. The ZipCD refused to burn CDs at its rated 4x speed, instead creating all its disks at 2x (a 60 minute audio CD took more than a half-hour to record.)

Since the drive comes with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator, it's easy to burn your own music CDs or create data CDs. Unfortunately, the slightly dated version of Adaptec software can't convert MP3 audio files to audio CD format, which limits the software's usefulness. The package also includes CD-labelling software from Avery and a program called QuickSync, which is great for backing up your PC.

Iomega's first CD-RW demonstrates a touch of promise and a touch of oversight. Hopefully, its next-generation drive will come with MP3 tools and burn disks a bit faster.

Iomega ZipCD
Company: Iomega
Ph: 02 9925 7700
Price: AU$659.

Micro Solutions Backpack Bantam CD-Rewriter

Designed as a portable CD-RW solution, this is the drive you want if you have a laptop or need to burn CDs while on the road. The drive ships with both a parallel port connector and a PC Card adaptor, and you can use whichever is more convenient. Unfortunately, the Backpack Bantam still needs access to AC power, so don't expect to burn CDs during extended travelling.

The backpack bantam is slim and portable, yet it includes a built-in speaker for listening to music without headphones. At low volume, the audio quality is passable, but trust us: You don't want to crank the volume. Since the drive comes with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator, you can burn audio CDs as well as make data CDs. As with Iomega's ZipCD, however, it's an older version of the software, and you'll need to upgrade to version 4.0 if you want to make CDs from MP3 tracks.

The drive turned in respectable 4x performance when creating audio CDs. But we have one minor quibble: Unlike all of the other drives in this roundup, it includes no starter media, so you'll have to pick up a box of CD-R or CD-RW disks before you get started.

Backpack Bantam CD-Rewriter
Company: ACA Pacific
Ph: 03 9674 8188
Price: AU$1,276.

Ricoh MP9060A

If you don't mind working with IDE cables and jumper settings, the Ricoh is the best software/hardware package in this roundup. It's an internal 6x CD-RW drive that doubles as a 4x DVD-ROM, which means that you can use one drive bay to read, record, and write CDs as well as play DVD movies. Best of all, this is a very fast recorder: Even though it's only a 6x drive, it burned audio CDs a hair faster than the 8x Creative 8432x.

Thanks to a to-the-point quick-start guide, we installed the Ricoh easier than we did the SoundBlaster. Plus, the software includes the new 4.0 version of Adaptec's Easy CD Creator software, which supports MP3 audio in addition to creating music CDs and data disks. The package also includes the CineMaster decoder for playing DVDs.

If you crave the DVD functionality, it's well worth the cost.

Ricoh MP9060A
Company: Ricoh
Ph: 02 8977 1111
Price: ERP AU$700.