This drive is a bit larger than some other firewire CD-RW drives, but the power supply is built in, so there's no brick or wall wart, just a standard power cord. The firewire cable included with the drive is about 6 feet long, and there are two firewire ports on the drive so you can chain it to another device. The drive also has audio outputs; an audio cable is not included but doesn't seem to be necessary - SoundJam can play the CD over the firewire interface.

The Mac software included with the drive includes Retrospect Express & Discribe. I didn't install either of these - I already have Retrospect & Toast installed. Toast (I'm using 5.0) and Retrospect both recognized the drive immediately, and have no problem using it. Toast identifies the drive as a Sony CRX-160E, so this drive must be using the same mechanism as the 160.

Drive speeds are everything I expected. Burning audio & data CD-Rs runs at the full 12x speed. Using Retrospect to perform backups runs quite a bit slower, about 3.5x (with compression turned off), but I assume that's because it's using packet writing.

Overall, this is an excellent drive & well worth the money.

Recommended: Yes