I am heavily interested in computers, software and information technology. Ok I admit it, I'm gadget...
I am heavily interested in computers, software and information technology. Ok I admit it, I'm gadget mad! I try to write honest opinions and sometimes they might be over technical, but thats the nature of computers.
Member since:28.09.2000
Reviews:139
Members who trust:77
Well it had to happen didn't it. The only component left over from my old machine has been replaced, and has gone to component heaven (not really, it's actually in the wanted ads, but hey I wanted to wax lyrical), to be replaced by this veritable speed demon.
My old cd-writer was a 24 x 2 x 2, Freecom badged Philips drive that took over 36 minutes to burn a full cd, so I decided it was time to upgrade and after much wandering around PC World (I know, I know I'm sorry but they were offering nine months interest free if you spent £200) I chose the TDK Cyclone 12 x 10 x 32 Burnproof Internal IDE drive. I paid (or will be) £179 for the retail pack which comes with the drive (obviously), Nero Burning Rom software, TDK mix master software, cables, marker pen, one cdr and one cdrw.
Installation is very easy, just a matter of sliding it into the tower, attaching the leads (the drive is set as master by default) and powering up the system. The drive is recognised by Windows 98 straight away so then it's just a matter of installing the burning software.
Nero is in my opinion the best and easiest of the cd writing software packages, although I haven't written an opinion about it here at Ciao, as others have said everything I wanted to say. The software supports Burnproof and there is actually an option to turn it off, but who would want to do that. For those that don't know what burnproof is, it is a part of the drives internal software (called firmware), that can stop the writing process onto a disk, if data isn't reaching the drive's buffer in time and then re-start the burn process without turning your disk into a coaster.
In practice this means that you can do other things like surfing the net, or writing an op at Ciao without the CD being ruined. It works very well and I spent ages trying to kill a disk, without success, although I write audio disks in one session, as the tracks tend to jump if the drive keeps stopping and starting.
Speedwise the drive does what it says. It's twelve speed for CDRs (which means that you have to get good quality disks) and will burn a full CD in around five minutes, including the lead in and lead out. It's slower when formatting and writing CDRW but as I don't use many, this isn't a problem for me. When reading from the disk, I have noticed a definite increase over my old drive but it still isn't as quick as my DVD drive, so I tend to use the latter to create disk images, for burning later.
I don't do any disk to disk copying as both drives are set on the same IDE channel, and would have problems as the IDE interface cannot handle synchronous data transfers very well (both too and from etc).
All in all this is a very good drive which can be bought online for around £150, but this should drop as TDK have just released a newer version that offers 16 speed writing, but in all honesty this is probably as fast as you will need.
Cheers - Craig
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Jun 12th, 2001
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