Good choice, if you get a good price.
Written: May 14 '01 (Updated May 14 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, rebate available till 06/02/01.
Cons: Software needs the downloadable update, a little picky about media.
The Bottom Line: At the right price a good bet. Consider a burnproof as an alternative.
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| oscen's Full Review: Sony Spressa Professional |
This is a review of the Sony CRX160EA1 12x8x32x internal IDE model.
I had fallen behind making backups using my old ACER 2x2x6x (it took like 40 minutes for a complete CDR) and when my motherboard went nuts and screwed up my hard drive, I decided to purchase a faster CDRW. I studied a lot of reviews, checked prices and waited for a deal by following salescircular.com.
I still hadn't really made my mind up about what to buy when a sale quickly came up at CompUSA with the SONY at about $110 after rebates. I was strongly considering a burnproof (which the Sony is not), but at that price I decided what the heck, I should have the horsepower to burn at 12x and the cheapest, off brand burnproof CDRW (LG) was like $30 more. (A name brand burnproof with software was like $80 more.)
So I bought the Sony (retail kit) and hurried home to try it out. My first obstacle was the outdated software. The software which came with the unit would not allow a copy from and to the same device. (I have giving up buying CDROMs and copying to the hard drive first is more reliable anyway.) So I downloaded the update and tried again (in test mode).
I was a little surprised to find that my system was not fast enough to write at 12x (BX, UDMA 33, Celeron 633, 192 MB). I ran the system monitor and saw that the CPU was getting pegged. Then it came to me, I had just rebuilt my system and had not remembered to set DMA mode on my hard drive (I had on the CDRW). So I set DMA mode on the hard drive, booted a couple of times and the write went fine (the CPU never even hit 50%).
Playing around with it, I was greatly pleased with the speed, but a little bugged that it did not like my older low speed CDRW media (even at low speed). I suspect that it is also fussy about about CDRs but I only buy high quality 12x CDRs, so I have made no coasters... yet anyway.
I found that I liked the software although it is rather different than my older Adaptec. Pretty much they do the same thing, though the Sony software is a lot more complete than the "lite" version one usually gets with a retail package (I have the full version of the Adpatec software). I haven't used a lot of the software package though and probably never will and maybe it isn't necessary for most folks.
All in all, I am very happy with my purchase. However, I would not have paid anything resembling list price for this device. In the $180 price range, one can get a name brand burnproof CDRW with adequate software. Generally, I recommend burnproofs for people as they are a lot more user friendly. Burning at high speed (even with a 4MB buffer) is pretty demanding and without a burnproof feature, it can fail. Some systems just aren't up to it and others can take a lot of tweaking to make them work.
Still at the price I paid, I give this product high marks. With good media, a reasonably fast system and a good level of system knowledge, it should work great. However, don't expect to jam it on any old system, use any old media and burn reliably at 12x.
Here a few ideas on how to ensure making good CDRS.
1) Enable DMA on ALL IDE devices.
2) Put the CDR on a separate IDE channel from the hard drive.
3) Copy to the hard drive first before making a copy.
4) Eliminate miscellaneous stuff from your system tray (and any other background stuff that may not show up there).
5) Close any program that might decide to use up a lot of cycles all by itself. Don't run anything really demanding at the same time (I find that certain software runs my allocated memory up to about 400 MB.)
6) Windows 9x is bad about memory cleanup. Reboot to clean up memory before burning.
7) Run system monitor to see where the problem is. If your CPU is pegging, more memory is probably the answer.
8) Use only quality media.
9) Make sure that your media is clean and looks undamaged. (I have found a surprising number of media come scratched, chipped or dirty from their packages.)
10) Check to see that your CDRs are readable on CDROMS (or CD players). A sign of poor media (or a failing CDRW) is that they seem to burn fine, only can't be read.
11) Check your software settings (for example that the session gets closed).
12) Try different media (maybe it isn't as good as you thought it was) and slower speed settings.
CDRWs are great and the Sony is very good, but I have found that burning causes a lot of people problems, so keep this in mind. A quality burnproof may be a safer bet.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
oscen
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Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 0 members
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