Drives > CD-RW Drives > Disk drive > from 9x to 16x

Advantages: Robust, fairly quick
Disadvantages: Not very cheap

The Yamaha 4416 SX CD rewriter is a robust machine. I use it for about one year now, and I have not experienced many problems. The device is delivered with 3 writable CD's and 1 rewritable CD. The software is CeQuadrat WinOnCD. With this software you can do almost any job. While writing data on a CD you have to take care your computer is not busy doing memory consuming jobs. WinOnCD uses a memory buffer while writing data to the CD-writer, and if ...
...speed. If your computer has less than 16 MB memory you better try to write at 2-speed, or have a trial session at 4 speed first. The Yamaha makes quite a lot of noise. It is not the cheapest machine in it's kind, but it has a great quality. ... Read review

Advantages: Good value, seems solid, quick enough, 2MB Buffer
Disadvantages: The Black & Gold finish looks odd on a beige tower!

...Update: in response to kfingleton's comment. I've only made 1 coaster. I'm running the philips drive (it's a 4x4x32 drive) on a k6-3 400 machine with a udma 33 HDD, 64 MB RAM, and a 40x cd reader. I only ever burn at 4x, and it's proving very successful. ... Read review

Advantages: see article
Disadvantages: see article

An expensive peice of kit but it more than does the job. After having this product for a little less than a year, I am quite pleased with it. The 4416S is a 4x writer, 4x rewriter, and a 16x reader. It operates on a SCSI-2 bus, which if you did not know, is a lot faster than your ordinary IDE bus, but requires a separate controller. After mastering a number of different types of software I now believe there is not alot that this machine can not do ... Read review

Advantages: It worked for a while; Recognised name on the cover
Disadvantages: Everything - slow, unreliable, doesn't work!

I have a 4416e. It is slow, and has always been problematical. I have had it for under 2 years and have only written about 50 CDs on it and now it no longer works. Despite numerous attempts at getting in touch with Yamaha, I have not received a response. The writer always had poor performance when writing data CDs, often leaving missing data and unusable files. For music CDs it was excellent, though. It gave excellent reproduction and no loss of ...
...but it just ruined the disc every time. I can’t count the number of discs that it has ruined, actually. It often goes through the full write process and puts no information on the disc at all – just enough to ruin the disc. I have tried different makes and qualities of discs, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I have downloaded new drivers and upgrades to the software and have even tried a different type of re-writing ... Read review

Advantages: Plextor are THE cdwriters
Disadvantages: its old now and there are better available

...My high opinion of Plextor drives is founded on this drive. Lets hope modern Plextor drives are up to the standard of this one. The only downer is that scsi installation was tricky. It seemed to prefer the scsi cards with built in cache to those without. I can't explain why but would guess that the timeouts on its scsi connection were perhaps slighltly too fast. One reason I liked the drive so much was that a PSX game was copied on various writers ... Read review