Advantages: Robust, reliable, fast
Disadvantages: Does not support Win95, heavy, not a very nice design

...A high-end performer in its class, this writer is an external disk drive that I would recommend for both professional and home users who frequently have to transfer large amounts of data on CDs, and for whom speed is essential. Robust and reliable, this external unit can read and write at 48x speed, and rewrite at 24x. It connects to your PC via USB 2.0 (my tests indicate an access time of less than 65msec) and the setup is very quick and easy (beware, 64MB RAM and 1GB HDD space are required). The firmware is stored in flashROM, so it accepts updates; a couple of months ago, I have just updated mine to the last version (1.05 07/28/03). As for the software, it came with drivers & some utilities, plus Roxio Easy CD Creator and Roxio DirectCD. PlexTools are not fantastic, but quite good, and include a CD tester, various settings... Read review

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Advantages: fast,simple,easy,good price
Disadvantages: none so far

...and decided that I would go far a Hewlett Packard Drive. Now this is another important decision, external drives require some kind of connection to the back of your PC. Now the 2 most common are, USB and SCSI. USB, (Universal Serial Bus) is new fairly new technology for connecting multiple devices to your PC, The theory is, that you plug in the device (can be anything from a keyboard, mouse to speakers, printers and even CD Writers!), and then your computer will set it up for, you, asking for any supplied disks, and then your ready to go, without restarting your PC. USB limits a speed of about 600 kb/sec. If you don’t understand, it basically means, that the fastest time you could write your CD is around 20 minutes, for a whole disk. Although some jobs may take you only a couple of minutes. Now SCSI is much faster, it can achieve speeds... Read review

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Advantages: Cheap and reliable.
Disadvantages: Not the fastest drive on the market

...I bought this CD Writer on the recommendation of a friend who had also recently purchased one. I got mine from Stak Trading’s web site (www.staktrading.com) for the bargain price of £69.32 including VAT and Delivery! I think the RRP is something like £150, or at least, it was, this model has probably been superseded by a newer model, hence the low price. I’m not sure exactly how long this piece of kit has been around, but I would guess at around a year. However, for what you get it is impossible to fault. The minimum system requirements stated by Hewlett Packard are: Pentium 200 MHz Microsoft Windows 95B or 98 32 Megs of RAM 35 Megs of hard drive space for software installation. What you get: 1 CD Writer (!) + screws. 1 IDE cable (just in case you need one) 1 Blank 74min CD-R 1 Installation CD... Read review

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Advantages: Low cost and high quality
Disadvantages: None that I have found

...This is the best CD Writer I have ever used and would recommend it to anyone that wants high quality at under £150, if you have a budget of £200 you could go for the 9000 series CD Writer. It’s a 24 x 4 x 4 unit that is more than capable of carrying out most tasks that the home user would require. The writer comes bundled with Easy CD Creator so the minute it's installed your ready to start making your own CD's. With Easy CD Creator you can make audio and data CD's as well as CD to CD copying all at the touch of a button and if your not too sure it has a wizard built into it and does most of the setting up for you. It also includes on the installation CD some software for drag and drop creation so it's even easier to create your own CD's. The first thing I did with it was transfer all my old vinyl records on to CD which will play in most... Read review

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Advantages: Cheap and comparable to the more expensive Plextor
Disadvantages: Easy CD is maybe not as good as WinOnCD and support is vague

...Are you fed up waiting for that dodgy copy of you mates cd to burn? Tired of watching how slow your pathetic, unbadged, 2 speed cdwriter spits out those copies? Or maybe you're lukcy, and have a 4 speed cdwriter. Maybe even an 8 speed one. Now that's not bad now, is it - what is that, around 10 mins a cd? That's not bad. Now consider what it would be like to burn cd's in around 6 minutes. Now I'm not trying to be like that serial murderer blokey out of There's Something About Mary - you know, the one who goes on about his idea for the "8 minute abs video", only to be told "What if someone comes out with '7 minute abs'?" - cos I know that you're going to tell me there are faster drive around, before you say it! ;-) The drive I am writing this opinion about is the Memorex TwelveMaxx 1032. It is a 12 speed CD writer drive, which... Read review

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Advantages: Easiest Possible Installation
Disadvantages: Uses Yet Another Mains Socket

...second. This is ideal for external CD-Writers and hard drives etc. ----=What Does The Hub Do?=---- What do you do when you have used all of your USB ports on your computer? Cry? No! You get a Belkin 4 port hub. It basically plugs in to one of your existing ports and allows you to then plug a further 3 extra devices in. No installation is required; it is a straight plug n play job. You can "daisy chain" these devices to connect up to 127 USB peripherals to each socket on your PC. The only downside is that you do have to plug it in to a mains socket, meaning yet another one to find. ----=What Does It Look Like?=---- In keeping with the "high tech" look, it is cased in a semi-transparent smoked case. On the back are the 4 USB ports, with 4 corresponding LED's on the front to show connection/activity. Also on the back... Read review

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Advantages: External and can be easily moved between computers
Disadvantages: Low data transfer rates

...I bought this device because I wanted a CD-RW drive but diidn't have enough room to put one in my PC case. The drive is very reliable - I have written over 100 CDs with it and I haven't had any fail. Another big advantage with the drive being USB is that it can easily be moved between computers. When my friends ask me if they can write a CD on my computer, I can let them borrow the drive, which means I don't have to spend ages transferring their files and writing the CDs. The drive has a headphone socket, line out and volume control so can be used to play audio CDs. The writer is capable of writing and rewriting at 4x, which is 600KB per second - at this rate it takes about twenty minutes to write a CD. The drive can only read at 6x, which is prehistoric in terms of speed as almost all internal drives can do 48x these days... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable, well built, works easily.
Disadvantages: Not a speed demon

...The LaCie DVD+/-RW Double Layer Drive USB 2.0 is a very reliable and strongly built machine. I've had it for a few months now and it hasnt let me down yet. I use it weekly to back up my photography files onto dvd and various other documents and it does the job perfectly. Ok, its no speed demon, it took a good 1/2 hour to burn footage of my 1 year old nephew through iDVD but it got the job done and as long as you have the time, its no problem at all. A kool feature is that its basically a 4 in 1 drive. It'll read cd's, write cd's, read dvd's and burn dvd's. The cd thing isnt so great now as most computers come with cd readers and writers built in but its handy to have any way. I love the design of this drive. It's not the clunky slab of grey tinny metal I'm used to, but a sleek well desined effort that sits elegantly on your... Read review

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Advantages: easy to use, lightweight, wide range of supported memory card formats, useful freebie software included
Disadvantages: none

...for their cheap and cheerful accessories. A green LED shows that the device is attached while a yellow LED shows that the memory card is being written to. If you have a Nokia Mobile with a MMC card in it (e.g. the 6230) then this is a very cheap alternative to a data cable to allow you to use your phone as an mp3 player – although of course you have to turn the phone off and take the card out to copy songs onto the memory card. This little box of tricks set me back EUR 19.99 in a high street retailer in Austria (Niedermeyer), which I deem to be excellent value, given the fact that some card reader and writer units offering fewer types of storage media are more expensive. I can't fault it, and would recommend it to anyone who prefers to only have to take a single USB device with them rather than a host of USB cables for their various devices... Read review

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

...this caddy based cdwriter was perhaps the classic writer. Although annoyingly caddy based it featured 4x writing and good 12x reading in its day. It has no rewrite ability at all. Capable of important stuff like DAO raw writing it still today is better equipped for copying protected CDs compared to many current models like Yamaha. Build quality is heavy and strong. The drive I'm reviewing had massive use before coming my way and yet still operated well. 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... Read review

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