Burn baby burn!
Written: Dec 03 '01 (Updated Dec 04 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Extremely easy to setup and use, wonderfully portable
Cons: All plastic body makes the unit feel a little fragile
The Bottom Line: Need to have burning ability wherever you go? Then this burner is for you!
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| kenshin27's Full Review: SmartDisk (FWCDRW-V8) CD-RW Burner |
After having finally gotten rid of my ancient Apple PowerMac 8500 along with the external SCSI 2X CD-R drive I had hooked up to it, I was in the market for a new burner. With only my trusty Powerbook left for daily use, I decided to look for a portable burn unit. At the time, the only portable Firewire burners that I knew of were La Cie's PocketCD-RW 8x4x24x, this Smartdisk 8x8x24x drive, and a yet-to-be-released drive from MCE that I saw a prototype of at MacWorld NY earlier during the summer.
The competition
The La Cie drive is a pretty decent drive with it's combo Firewire/USB connectors. For $399 (in early November), it comes with 2 Firewire ports, a USB port, and a power adapter. Now it costs only $299 which makes it a pretty good deal.
This Smartdisk drive was on sale from their website for $299 as well but they were back ordered till after the middle of November. The drive comes with just 2 Firewire ports and a Firewire cable. No AC adapter, but that isn't a big deal since the unit is powered through the Firewire port which is very nice. Keeping excess cables down to a minimum is always a plus.
The MCE drive I couldn't find on their website at all so I guess they're still working things out with it. Anyway, I decided to go with the Smartdisk because of the extra 4X for CD-RW and also because I was able to find one for a decent price on eBay. I also figured there'd be no way I'd be doing any burning via USB so that feature on the La Cie would be useless for me. Plus the Smartdisk drive I believe is just a bit smaller in size as well.
Hardware check
This burner is 7" long, 5.5" wide, and .8" thick. Nice and small for good portability. It works with a tray mechanism where the entire front of the drive pops out. Located in the middle of the front side is the black eject button, a status light, and a pinhole for manual ejections. The corners on all sides are rounded and the entire case is plastic which makes it feel a little flimsy but there's still a decent heft to it. Although the flimsiness is accentuated by the fact that when you have the tray in the out position to take a CD, if you press down too much on the tray, the entire unit will tip forward a little. So I feel that I often have to be more careful when I'm inserting a CD.
The right side of the unit has an audio out jack. The back of the drive consists of 2 Firewire ports, a power in port, and a security lock slot like you'll find on any laptop.
Let 'em rip!
Well, with a Mac and OS X, using a Firewire burner couldn't be easier. When you place a blank CD into the drive, OS X will automatically ask you to name the CD. Then it'll mount the CD like normal on your desktop. You can then drag and drop any file you want to burn right onto the CD icon. After you're finished organizing your CD, you can then choose the "Burn Disc" option and voila! a nice, new burned disc. Can't get much easier than that if you want to burn a backup disc. If you choose not to use this built-in feature, Roxio's Toast also works very well with this drive. And iTunes makes it just as easy to burn audio CDs. A standard 650MB CD will burn in about 7-8 minutes. It also has buffer under run protection that reduces the chance of errors being made during the burn process. Seems to work just fine since I haven't had a faulty disc yet.
And that's the wrap
Well, there's not very much else to say about this burner. Simple to carry around, simple to set up, simple to burn, it's a perfect companion burner for anyone with a Mac laptop. I carry this thing around with me all the time whenever I have my computer. There's no significant weight increase since it's mostly plastic and there's no bulky power adapter to store either. I'm not certain if this will work with a PC but I don't see why it wouldn't. But the only thing users have to be careful of is that CD tray. Like most trays, it feels a tad flimsier than I'd like and is the weak point for an otherwise perfect burner.
Apple Titanium Powerbook G4 - The ultimate portable computer:
http://www.epinions.com/content_16435285636
Mac OS X - Next gen OS for Apple:
http://www.epinions.com/content_22117322372
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 260
Operating System: Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
kenshin27
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Member: Ben C
Location: NJ
Reviews written: 34
Trusted by: 17 members
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