This review was one I wrote a while back for a hardware site I was going to create but, soon found that I didn't have the time for and it was never released to the public. But, I figured I'd still let the public know about this specific drive; and what better place then Epinions.com. So here it is.

The 36x Memorex CD-ROM Drive

For my new built system I wanted a cheap, fast, CD-ROM drive that would hold me over until DVD-ROM drives came down in price and up in quality, or for a CD-R drive to do that same. So, I went to Best Buy to pick up what I thought be a fine CD-ROM drive that’d do what I wanted for about half a year. I picked out the Memorex 36x drive with $30 rebate which brought it down to $49.95, not a bad price for a CD-ROM drive. I should’ve known...

Installation of the drives was easy if you’ve ever done it before and it really shouldn’t be that hard for a first timer. No instructions were included, but none were really needed. The drive came with four screws and audio connector.

I popped the drive in and put it on my second IDE channel as primary master. Since this was a completely new system I installed WIN98 on it right away. Installation took about a half hour and the drive was not too loud (this is why I gave it the plus in the final rating).

The next day I went to explore the win98 CD and install TweakUI. When I would try to install it from the tweakui.ini file the drive would constantly spin up and back down, up and down. So, to make sure I didn’t just have a bad CD (even though it was brand new) I inserted a different CD and tried to read a text file. Well I’d go into the text file and the drive would again do it’s repetitive spin up/spin down thing and then I’d get the old blue screen saying that the drive was no longer accessible, etc…

Overall, I was extremely disappointed with Memorex’s offering. I took it back that very day and got AOpen’s 40X CD-ROM.

Could I have got a bad drive? Possibly. Do I care? No, not really.

Overall Rating for the Memorex 36X CD-ROM drive - E+

Recommended: No