I've had a number of CD burners in the past ranging in brands. I purchased a Hi-Val distributed burner a number of years ago as my first burner. I have an 8x4x24 burner at home that I had been using for all purposes previously. Then I went away to school and left my computer at home and began using my laptop instead of my desktop PC. This is when I decided it was time to get a USB CD/RW.

I received the burner as a gift. The box it was packaged in gave the appearance of a generic Hi-Val USB CD/RW. I opened up the box and found the manual for the I/O Magic CD/RW drive. The odd part about this is I opened the packaging for the burner itself and found a 6x4x6 instead of a 4x4x6 (labeled on the burner itself) however the book it was packaged with stated 4x4x6. I hooked the burner up, installed the drivers, and began to test out the functionality of the drive when I came across another great surprise.

When attempting to burn my first CD with the drive, I noticed there was no "Test" option to burn with, which I found odd. So I set the write speed to 6x and just let it burn when I noticed Nero (which it came packaged with) displayed the words "Seemless Link activated". Now I knew what such technology as "Smartburn" or "Burnproof" meant at the time, however I had never heard of it referred to as Seemless link. This was the first drive I had ever had that had a buffer underrun protection.

So to my amazement I got a 4x4x6 regular USB external drive that turned out to be a 6x4x6 with buffer underrun protection (one of the most common problems that I had with my first drive was the buffer underruns).

The drive itself doesn't fit the exact category of the I/O Magic drive because it's definitely a different drive but it came in a very similar package, distributed as the I/O Magic, and with the manuals and drivers for that drive, so I found it best to place in this category.

The next great task was in updating my system to Windows XP. I had doubted I would find Hi-Val supporting drivers for this drive that would be compatible for Windows XP, but luckily they are easily downloadable from the Hi-Val (and I/O Magic distributes these drivers as well) web page.

I got a great bargain for what I ended up with. This drive works with every CD I throw at it, has not given me a problem at all, starts and stops flawlessly, and doesn't get hot in the slightest after running it for hours on end.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 100
Operating System: Windows