Fast Fast Fast
Written: Dec 20 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, Quiet, Great Software. Did I say FAST?
Cons: Documentation for Nero is poor.
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| egale's Full Review: TDK veloCD ReWriter 12/10/32 |
The time had come. The 250meg Zip drives were just not holding enough data plus those Zip cartriges just aren't popular enough to use everywhere. I decided to go with a CD-RW instead and after reading an article in January's Maximum PC bought a TDK veloCD.
First, this is one of the most expensive burners around. The Plextor equivalent (actually the TDK drive is a repackaged Plextor) regularly costs much less. I lucked out here. I purchased mine at buy.com for $259.99 which also included 50 blank TDK CDRs. I had a $30 buy.com coupon and I also found a $50 mail in rebate and buy.com had free shipping so my final cost was $179.99 delivered. Not bad!
The quality of this drive is high. While reading, it is super quiet, much more so than my Creative 8x DVD drive. While writing it is just about silent. This drive writes regular CDRs in about 6 minutes. That is fast! It also has a feature called burnproof. Burnproof prevents buffer underrun errors. When a CD is being burned, the laser continues to burn whether or not there is data in the buffer to be written. When you are doing other things on your PC while a CD is being burned, the buffer can get emptied and not filled before the drive is looking for more data. If that happens, your CD is ruined and you have made a coaster. With burnproof, this can't happen. This means no coasters and you can do other things on your PC until the CD is complete.
One of the reasons I went with TDK is their software package. It comes with Nero which is supposed to be the best burning software around. The Plextor comes with Adaptec's EasyCD. Having worked a bit with both packages, Nero is definitely more powerful but it is a lot more complicated. My advice would be for novices to use the wizard for a while as there are so many choices and unfortunately, the documentation is very poor. The wizard makes the burning process much more EasyCD like.
If you want to use CD-RWs, InCD has to be active. This by default gets loaded at startup. I found it to be a bit buggy even after I upgraded to a newer version than what came with the CD. Once InCD has scanned your CD-RW and verified it as such, you can now use the CD as if it were a floppy and drag and drop files onto it from Windows Explorer. I had a problem with it locking up a program I use instead of Explorer (Drag & File) when copying a certain file and InCD even locked up my machine once using Explorer as well. Again, there is a new version of InCD due out in January that will hopefully take care of the problems.
Installation was relatively painless. The kit comes with two blank CDRs, 1 blank CD-RW, a CD marking pen, a cable, screws, and an installation video. The drive must be the master on the IDE channel it is on. This meant I had to make my DVD drive the slave but it worked ok. Again a documentation problem but TDK says DMA must be ON for the drive and Nero's documentation says it must be OFF. I have it on and everything works.
Today, this is the fastest drive on the market. Tomorrow it won't be and a year from now I will be replacing it with the new latest and greatest. Until then I will have lots of fun with this. You won't be disappointed in this drive's performance, quality and software bundle. Just remember Nero's wizard is there if you are confused. After making a few CDs you will be hooked.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
egale
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Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 9 members
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