I picked up my HP 9300i at my local Circuit City. It's very strange I continue to go back to Circuit City to buy components (It's 4 blocks away) yet I hate buying from them. I will explain in another review.

Until recently I never knew about Epinions and what a gold mine it has turned out to be. So I feel that I want to add to it. This is my second “epinion” and I hope to make it a good one. The bottom line there is not much to write about on a CD-RW drive, aside from performance, compatibility, reliability, ease of use. The speed is something you lock yourself into once you buy it, so that is not anything I’d complain about. But I would like to say that this drive is 10x 4x 32x. What that means is that it writes CDR’s at 10x, rewrites CD-RW’s at 4x, and can read CD’s at 32x. It is plenty fast, and I’m able to burn a full CD in under 8 min.

Installation and Compatibility: This drive is a breeze to put in. Being that it is an internal drive you should make sure you are comfortable with the inside of your computer. If you are not, I highly recommend that you have someone who is, install that drive for you. The manual was very clear and I had the drive up and working in no time at all.

Reliability: This drive has been putting out those CD’s like no tomorrow. It has no burped (failed, thus resulting in a new plastic coffee coaster) on me once. It can burn at 10x provided you have the media that is rated to burn at that speed.

Ease of use: This drive is a snap to run. The provided Adaptec Direct-CD is pretty annoying. Because it does not give you a GUI, (Graphical User Interface; a program window) it instead lets you drag and drop files to the folder that represents your drive. I highly recommend that you by Adaptec’s Easy CD Creator or the Nero Burning Rom. Both are great programs, which I have.

Final Note: There is only one gripe is have with this drive, and it is the color. Unless you have a HP machine this drive will not match the color of your case. Besides that I love this drive. I will recommend it to whoever asks, and I will continue to buy from HP.


Recommended: Yes