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The Iomega CD-RW 48x24x48x USB 2.0 drive appeared to be a good choice, Iomega being a well trusted and reliable manufacturer. I paid around £60 , but you may find it cheaper if you shop around. I did come across lesser brands with a similar spec at lower prices, but I felt they would lack ... Read review
Advantages: Quality Build, No messing inside your PC, Bundled Software Disadvantages: Maybe a bit pricey.
...interface.
The Iomega CD-RW 48x24x48x USB 2.0 drive appeared to be a good choice, Iomega being a well trusted and reliable manufacturer. I paid around £60 , but you may find it cheaper if you shop around. I did come across lesser brands with a similar spec at lower prices, but I felt they would lack the quality.
Upon opening, I was presented with a very solid piece of kit in a jet black finish. The box also contained ... .../>
I installed the supplied Iomega Hotburn Utility, this is a bit like Nero or Easy CD Creator, but with fewer features, but I have found it ok but a little slow. There was also a version of Hotburn for the Mac if you are that way inclined. Other software included Adobe active-share, and a Jukebox program, but I did not bother with these as I already had simailar software installed. Obviously, you could install Nero or whatever software you have ... more
Having only a 52xCD rom in my rather dull (but quite adequate) IBM workstation I was missing the ability to burn cd’s backing up data important data that I could with previous machines.
Not fancying taking the lid of, and removing fiddly blanking plates - scraping skin off my thumbs, I decided upon the external USB approach, since like most, the PC is equipped with a fast USB2.0 interface.
The Iomega CD-RW 48x24x48x USB 2.0 drive appeared to be a good choice, Iomega being a well trusted and reliable manufacturer. I paid around £60 , but you may find it cheaper if you shop around. I did come across lesser brands with a similar spec at lower prices, but I felt they would lack the quality.
Upon opening, I was presented with a very solid piece of kit in a jet black finish. The box also contained a suitable USB cable, a figure of eight mains cable, power supply, a software driver disk and of course instructions (being a typical bloke, I never read instructions unless the item doesn’t work).
Installation was very easy; as the PC had XP Pro installed and was connected to the internet. The CD-RW psu was fired up, and then I plugged it into a redundant USB2.0 slot using the cable. After a few seconds; “Ping – new hardware detected”; said the PC. After less than a minute the drivers etc were installed. I feel this may have been a little more troublesome if using my other windows 98 machine – probable would have needed a couple of re-boots. Looking in the ‘My Computer’ section indicated the PC was seeing the drive correctly. If the PC only has a USB1.1 port, I would have had to buy a USB2.0 hub.
I installed the supplied Iomega Hotburn Utility, this is a bit like Nero or Easy CD Creator, but with fewer features, but I have found it ok but a little slow. There was also a version of Hotburn for the Mac if you are that way inclined. Other software included Adobe active-share, and a Jukebox program, but I did not bother with these as I already had simailar software installed. Obviously, you could install Nero or whatever software you have and the drive will work fine with these.
Burning CD’s is quick and easy, it takes 3-4 minutes for a 60 minute CD to be copied at top speed. In my view it works as well as APTAPI/IDE drives I have used. The Hotburn program allows you to copy data (programs), compilation CD from your MP3’s, a straight CD copy, and also multi-session CD’s, i.e. you can keep writing little bits of stuff until it is full.
CD R/W disk can also be used and erased with this drive, these first have to be formatted that can take up to 45 minutes (yawn). While I am on the subject of yawning, below is the technical spec if anyone is interested.
-Buffer Memory: 2 MB -Burnproof: no -CD Read Speed: 48 -CD Rewrite Speed: 24 -CD Write Speed: 48 -CD re-writeable: yes -CD record speed: CD-R W48 -CD recordable: yes -Product type: CD re-writeable -Cod & Chips: no -USB1.1: no -USB2.0: yes
I was doing a bit of on-line shopping the other day and noticed that an Iomega 52x24x52x CDRW Drive appears to be replacing this model (it is a similar price). Also DVD combi version is available for a tenner more. (Look on insight.com).
IN GENERAL: A top quality piece of kit, which will probably outlast your pc.
