Teac Desktop CD-ROM 532E

The Teac 532 cd rom drive is an cd-rom reader that is designed to be fitted internally into a PC.

I had this unit in my PC for about 2 years before I decided to upgrade the whole system.

I paid about £120 for this drive and at the time 32x read speed was about the industry standard. How times change as now we are looking up to 72x read speeds on cd-rom drives, which make this unit look positively tortoise-like!
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...the unit is no longer manufactured, but TEAC do offer more up to date cd-rom drives with quicker read speeds, and so I would recommend that you take a look at them if you want a high quality cd drive.

Thanks for reading!

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The Teac 532 cd rom drive is an cd-rom reader that is designed to be fitted internally into a PC.

I had this unit in my PC for about 2 years before I decided to upgrade the whole system.

I paid about £120 for this drive and at the time 32x read speed was about the industry standard. How times change as now we are looking up to 72x read speeds on cd-rom drives, which make this unit look positively tortoise-like!

Specs
This cd-rom drive is compatible with operating systems up to Windows 98. It has a 32x read speed and needs to be fitted into a IDE interface inside the computer.

The drive measures, (W) 5.75” (H) 1.65” (D) 7.56”. It weighs 2.65lbs. Overall these are the standard measurements for a cd-rom drive, otherwise it wouldn’t fit into your computer!

On the front panel of the unit, from left to right there are, headphone socket, volume control, read indicator light and eject button. The cd tray ejects in a nice, smooth manner!

In Use
The main problem with these units is that you have to fit them yourself into the PC.

At this time you really are at the mercy of the computer manufacturer, as some PCs are very user friendly when it comes to upgrades, and some are less so!

Guess which type my PC was? Yes, the less than user friendly type! For some reason my computer had a metal plate fixed in front of the 5.25 disk tray (where I wanted to attach this drive), meaning I could not insert the drive until I had removed the plate. It needed about 20 minutes of hammering away (with a hammer) at this plate before the thing finally gave way! Once the plate had been removed, attaching the drive was easy, it just needed to be slid into place and then the spare IDE cable and power supply attached into the back.

My computer was using Windows 98, and I am glad to say that the operating system picked up the cd-rom drive as soon as the computer was re-booted.

The drive functioned well and without problems and the read speed has been quite acceptable. It must be said that the unit is now quite out-dated as newer cd-rom drives have a much faster read speed than this one!

In my time of using the drive I have not encountered any reliability problems, and it has read every disk that I have put into it.

Conclusion
This has been a very reliable cd-rom drive and I would recommend it to anyone. Unfortunately the unit is no longer manufactured, but TEAC do offer more up to date cd-rom drives with quicker read speeds, and so I would recommend that you take a look at them if you want a high quality cd drive.

Thanks for reading!

 

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