Iomega's 52x CD burner is solid on performance, although it lacks anything that really makes it stand out. Read our Australian review.
It's a testament to the impact that DVD-Burners are having in the market, irrespective of whether you go down the +R or -R route, that humble CD-RW burners are becoming so cheap. A case in point is Iomega's 52x24x52 CD-RW burner, which will set you back only AU$149. There are cheaper drives out there on the market, to be sure, but Iomega's branding alone usually drives the price difference a touch higher than this.
The 52x CD-RW comes with a pretty basic installation set; IDE cable, four screws and an audio cable, but that's all you actually need. Given the 52x burn rating of the drive, it might be a nice step to include at least one piece of blank media, however. If internal drive installation scares the life out of you, you may want to consider an external drive; Iomega's latest offering in this space is a 48x chunky black external affair.
Once installed in our test system, it was simply a matter of installing the supplied Nero applications for CD-burning. Unlike most previous Iomega products, you're given the option to install discrete packages, and if you do this in the wrong order you can end up rebooting up to four times; our tip here is to install everything you need and then reboot once.
From a features point of view, the most notable thing about the Iomega drive is the rewrite speed, a healthy 24x on CD-RW media. It's no slouch with CD-R, either, with a claimed 52x writing speed on that media, and a similar reading speed for normal CD media. It's got Burn-Proof inbuilt, Mount Rainier support as well as the capacity to overburn CDs if you really must squeeze those last few drops of storage out of your blank media. Given the ludicrously low cost of blank media currently, we're not sure why anyone would legitimately bother.
On the software side we're much more impressed with this drive than we were the 48x external Iomega drive. All of the drive's software offerings are built around Nero Burning Rom 5.5, an extremely capable package that also manages to be extremely user-friendly at the same time. The packaging notes that it's not compatible with any other burner apart from the drive it's bundled with, but we had no problems with a secondary installed burner in our test machine; your experience may, however, vary. The InCD packet writing software supplied worked acceptably with our test drive, although users may find it a little clunky compared to Windows XP's inbuilt CD-RW support.
Testing with Nero CD Speed the 52x24x52 managed an average 38x burn rate, which translated into a swift 2:23 to burn 600MB of small files to a CD-R. It averaged 31x for audio extraction, taking 2:43 to rip out a 50 minute audio CD. Testing with CD-RW media showed that the supplied inCD packet writing software wasn't quite so nippy, taking just over five minutes to write 400MB.
The 52x24x52 burner comes with a one year warranty, which isn't exceptional, although it's pretty much the industry norm. At the AU$149 asking price it's a decent investment for anyone looking to upgrade an existing burner, especially for a 'name brand' drive. If you want to save money, though, there are cheaper no-name equivalents.
Iomega 52x24x52 CD-RW Burner
Company: Iomega Australia
Price: AU$149
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 02 8223 9140
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