What kind of USB cable is that anyways!?
Written: Aug 05 '00 (Updated Feb 13 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, USB connection for ease of mobility
Cons: USB/SCSI cable driver may need to be loaded manually (some shipped with bad cables)
The Bottom Line: If you need a good external CDRW drive, I would recommend getting the Hewlett Packard 8300e series and avoid the Philips altogether.
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| Gr8ful's Full Review: Philips PC 400 Series External USB |
Note: Important update at the bottom of the page concerning a problem with the USB/SCSI cable.
The Philips PC400 External USB CDRW drive is a fine device and great if you have a laptop or plan on moving it from computer to computer. It writes and rewrites at 4X and can play audio CD's with the stereo cables that attach to your sound input on your computer.
I recently had the honor of trouble shooting an installation that one of my customers had done at home. She had connected the drive and installed the software but the drive would burn 4 out of 10 songs and stop. The CD would show 10 songs but only 4 would play. She also had anomalous problems like the computer freezing up when trying to write CD's.
She was using the device on a Compaq 1600 notebook with plenty of RAM and all the necessary specifications to use the drive. I was almost at wits end when I tried to install the drive on our computer to see if it was the drive or the computer that was not functioning properly and found what the problem was.
The problem was the cable that Philips uses to connect to the USB on the computer. It is a proprietary design but works great... when the drivers are installed for the cable. That's right the cable itself has drivers that must be installed for the device to work properly. When the drivers for the cable are loaded, the cable shows up in Windows device manager as a SCSI device controller. This is where I get my title from, but the cable and drive work absolutely fantastically when properly installed.
For some reason, (known only to Compaq engineers) the Compaq 1600 laptop did not detect the cable and ask for the drivers to be loaded, but it did detect the drive and showed it as a CDROM in Windows and Adaptec EZ CD Creator 4.0 recognized the drive as a CDRW drive. This is really strange because on our computer without the cable drivers installed, Windows could not tell what the drive was. Windows knew there was a device there but couldn't determine what kind of device it was.
So in conclusion, this drive works great and can burn a full 650MB CD in 18 minutes. There are some computers out there that won't ask for the cable driver, if this happens to you all you have to do is install it manually directly from the installation CD then Windows will automatically find and install the device. Other than the Compaq 1600 notebook computer, I have not had any problems with this drive and after proper installation it works on the Compaq 1600 just fine also.
Update: 10/11/00
First I apologize to the community for having posted a second review of this product. That review has been deleted by myself and has been added here as an update to my existing review. Thanks to shauncool for informing me of my mistake.
This update is to inform potential buyers of a problem that recently rose it's ugly head with the proprietary SCSI/USB cable used to connect this drive to the computer.
The USB cable that this drive uses to connect to the computer is a proprietary SCSI cable that converts/adapts to USB. The cable it's self requires drivers in order for this drive to work properly or even to be seen by the operating system. Recently, (in the last month) many of the cables shipped with the drives are bad and cannot be detected by the USB port or Windows.
The cables that are bad have a silver sticker on the back of the end that plugs into the drive and states, "Made in China". The drives that were shipped with good cables have a white sticker on the back and are made in the USA or other countries. One of the customers at our tech bench having this problem called Philips and was told there were many of these drives shipped with bad cables but as of yet there has been no recall.
If you have one of these drives with the bad cable you can return it to the store you bought it from if you are within the store's return policy. If you are not you must contact Philips to get a good cable from them.
When the drive is attached to a good cable it works fine and does a good job of writing CD's and CDRW's at 4x speed, but until this is cleared up you may want to steer clear of this writer.
Update 12/10/00
The last 10 or so installations I have performed on this drive have had no problems with the cable detecting or installing properly. I figured it was time to edit my review to reflect this new information. I have however discovered another drawback to this CDRW drive that made me lower my rating of this product one more notch.
This drive does not support RAW writing or subchanel data extraction. This basically means if you want to make a backup of you installation software CDs, you won't be able to do it if they are copyright protected. This was one of the primary reasons I bought a CDRW drive in the first place, to copy my installation CDs for backup.
This drive also does not support subchanel audio extraction. This means if a music CD is copyright protected you will not be able to extract the digital audio from it. Although not many audio CDs use this type of copyright protection, some do and almost all games do as well. Therefor I have lowered my rating to only three stars for this drive.
Update 02/13/01
Yet another development in the Philips saga. Recently I noticed all the Philips external CD writers have been altered and no longer use the diabolic SCSI/USB cable that has plagued the drives since they were first released. The drives now use a regular USB cable that does not require special drivers to install. However, this does nothing to improve the performance of the drive. It simply makes it easier to install.
Recommended:
No
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