Can write, but can't read
Written: May 06 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Writes data well, uneventful installation.
Cons: Very slow reading. Appears to require more expensive discs to format properly
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| slimtae's Full Review: Ricoh Internal CD-RW drive |
I've had the Mediamaster 7040A for about one year now. I've installed it onto two different computer systems without any problem whatsoever. Both were Dell systems, and on both it was set as the slave drive on the same IDE interface as the native DVD drive. The unit has never really malfunctioned. It records data onto CDRW discs almost perfectly...I say almost because one JPEG photo out of the hundreds I've stored onto discs became corrupted, and un-restoreable. I've made a copy of an audio CD only once, and that went flawlessly.
The unit ships with a lot of software to make and copy CD's of all different types. The one I use most often is the Cequadrat package which basically allows you to use your CDRW as a very large floppy. You can drag and drop stuff onto it just like any other storage media. If you have very large files you need to save and want to preserve your hard disk space, this is an ideal solution.
There are three issues you should be aware of. One, the drive appears to work better with certain brands of CDRW media. I bought a 10 pack CDRW from Memorex because it was very cheap...but 4 out of the 10 did not format properly on the drive, and had to be discarded. The Ricoh people told me that I should use the CDRW discs recommended in the instruction manual. I suspect these are more expensive, but are probably worth the price if cheaper ones do not format properly on the unit. One of the brands is by...you guessed it...Ricoh.
The other issue to be aware of....the drive reads CDRW discs very, very slowly. It takes about 5-8 seconds to open up a 100-200KB JPEG file...a long time if you have to access mroe than one file from a single disc. It actually reads CDRW disc data slower than a 4X CD ROM drive I used to have years ago. I don't know if this has improved with the newer models.
The last issue is the actual amount of space available per disc. Although a CD disc should hold around 650MB of data, when the disc is formatted with the Cequadrat utility for data storage, the actual disc itself has 500-600MB of storage space.
Overall, the 7040A is a dependable unit which works well. It is perfect for storing a large number of files, and the included CD read/write/copy utilities seem to work well. It's slow read capabilities is the only drawback.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
slimtae
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Reviews written: 95
Trusted by: 11 members
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