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Burn Baby BurnJan 06 '01 Write an essay on this topic.It seems that everybody either has or wants a cdr/rw these days. With so many brands on the market how does one choose which brand to buy? Well, the key factors like most things is cost verse quality, however with cdr/rw's the results are much more evident. You get what you pay for. If you really want a cdr/rw and are going to be using it frequently, don't skimp out. Trust me, in the long run you will save yourself more time and money by purchasing a quality drive. While media has become relatively dirt cheap compared to even a year ago, you don't want to waste half of a bundle of 50 cds. I have seen it happen. Not only should you purchase a high quality drive, but you will aid yourself buy purchasing high quality media to go with it. For example, I personally have had 5 bad burns out of 100. None of those 5 coasters were the fault of the drive or the media, but my own error or malfunction of another component of my system (I had a dying hard drive in my system that was causing windows to crash). On the contrary, I work for a school district, or in other words we purchase stuff as cheap as we can get it. We have bought several generic brand cdr/rw's off of places such as Tiger Direct. We have bought cheap media to go with it. 3 out of every 4 cd's fails. In the end you save money by going with a quality drive. Furthermore, you save a lot of time, as the best drives today can burn a cd in about 5 minutes as opposed to 10-16 minutes most generic drives do (when they work anyway). The difference between a generic and a good cdr/rw can range from $50-150 depending on where you shop. If you are interested in a cdr/rw I suggest checking Pricewatch*. *for more information on pricewatch follow that link: http://www.epinions.com/webs-review-38F0-2066453B-3A4F7581-prod4 At the time of this article a generic drive costs about $95. A solid, dependable drive that I would recommend goes for $166. This drive is the Plextor 8x4x32, which I will get to in a bit. You can get what I would consider the best drive on the market, Plextor's 12x10x32 for $210. There are different standards for storage device inputs in today's pc's. The two major ones at this time are EIDE and SCSSI. SCSSI is much more expensive and not necessary for the common user, so all the drives that I mentioned are geared towards the EIDE interface, which ships in about 95% of the common consumer pc market. Plextor is an established leader in cdr/rw technology. Their drives boast the fastest extraction and writing times, and they also boast the most stabile drives on the market. The 8x4x43 model writes at 8x, rewrites at 4x (cdrw media required), and reads at 32x. The 12x10x32 model is not just faster, however it also has improved technology that lets you multitask while your write your cds. For more information on the Plextor 8x4x32 use the url below: http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-50E8-B7C53B1-3873C53F-prod1 For more information on the Plextor 12x10x32 use url below: http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-40E3-314CF48A-39A92607-prod5 If anyone asked me to recommend a drive regardless of what they said their price range was, I would point them to one of these two drives. You might be able to get a cheaper drive for $100, but CHEAP is the word. The little extra money that you spend on the Plextor 8x4x32 alone is worth the speed, stability, and convenience. If you have or could stretch the money I highly recommend you purchase the 12x10x32 model as the technology used in it called BurnProof will eliminate buffer under-runs (the leading cause of coaster making), and the technology will allow you to use your computer while burning a cd (I do some minor multitasking with the 8x4x32 but I highly recommend that you don't do any (unless you have at least 128megs of ram, a p2-400, a decent speed hard drive; and then keep it to a minimum, maybe reading an article online or IRC). Furthermore, check the minimum system requirements for any cdr/rw before you purchase the item and make sure your pc exceeds them. I was in a pc store the other day and a customer asked a question about which media he should use, because he kept burning coasters (dead cds). It turned out he bought a Plextor from the store, and the media he bought was decent, but he had the cdrw in a p233 machine with 32megs of ram. An alternative to cdrw are Zip type media devices. The cartridges are much more expensive than cds, they hold a lot less, and they are a lot slower. You can burn a cd and use it in just about every computer these days. However, if you need to copy files off of a remote computer a cdrw won't help you much, unless you get an external which will be slow. Here a portable Zip drive shines and you might want to look into that. I hope that was helpful, and as it is 4:30am (why do I write my reviews so late?), I hope that I haven't accidently left out too much. I will leave you now with some tips for burning cds: -As I said try not to multitask unless you have a drive with BurnProof ie. Plextor or Iomega (Iomega resells Plextor drives with Iomega on the front and an extra $20 on the price tag). -Use quality media. I like TDK all speed certified. I have never had a problem with Audio or Data cds. I also have a bunch of cheap stuff (PNY 12x certified 80min cds). It was not expensive; while they are good for data, I would not recommend using them for Audio as they beep/skip a lot. -Make sure your drive is up to date. Plextor offers firmware updates so that you can get the best performance out of your drive. The latest firmware 1.7 I believe, adds 32x Digital Audio Extraction for the 12x10x32. -Don't use cdrw's for audio/media cds.  |
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