CD-RW drive hardware doesn't get any better than this. You not only get the fastest write and rewrite speeds and buffer underrun protection, but the AU$899 Ricoh MP9120A doubles as an 8x DVD reader as well.
The Ricoh 9120A has everything you could ask of a CD-RW drive -- the fastest CD write and rewrite speeds currently available, buffer-underrun protection that makes it almost impossible to spoil a CD, and the ability to read DVDs at 8X speed. The rest of the bundle, however, doesn't quite measure up to this high-end hardware. In performance tests, the drive performed about the same -- and sometimes a bit better -- than its similarly-specced sibling, the MP7120A. Write speed was exactly what you would expect of a 12x writer: On our 800MHz PIII Dell Dimension XPS B800r test system, it took 6 minutes, 42 seconds to create a full CD-R from data on the hard drive. In addition, the "JustLink" underrun protection feature made it possible to write at 12x even when the source drive couldn't reliably supply data at that rate. Like the similar "BurnProof" technology found on drives like the Plextor 1210A, this feature allows the drive to pause briefly before the buffer runs out, and then resume again at the same spot once it has enough data to write. As a re-writer, this drive copied 301 MB of data to a CD-RW disc in just 4 minutes, 13 seconds, using the latest 10x media. That's fast enough to make it a practical backup device. The drive also did very well in our tests as a CD/DVD reader, achieving a data-transfer rate of 2.62 MB/sec (a score similar to a slow hard drive).
The CD creation software that comes with the 9120A is Prassi's PrimoCD Plus. It has all of the basic functionality and is very compact. It's also a bit simpler to use than Adaptec's Easy CD Creator, the software that comes with most other CD-RW drives. It has a few quirks, however. The program doesn't have a built-in file explorer, for example, and recommends that you run it tiled with the Windows Explorer if you want to drag and drop files into your CD. More significantly, it won't copy individual CD audio tracks to a compilation CD. In order to include these tracks, you first have to convert them to MP3 or WAV files using your own software -- a serious drawback.
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