BUSlink Internal CD-RW Drive - Fast CD-burning for Only $19
Written: Dec 09 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low price, easy to install and use, buffer underrun protection, fast
Cons: Nero instead of EZ CD Creator, no "play" button (but nobody uses them anyway)
The Bottom Line: Overall, I am very pleased with the drive so far. And for only $19 (provided I get the mail-in rebates), it is a very good value.
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| dkozin's Full Review: BUSlink (RW-4048) CD-RW Burner |
I purchased my drive at BestBuy – they had it for $19 after two mail-in rebates ($30 and $20). The drive is an internal model and comes with Nero Burning ROM.
The installation was quite easy – the 4 mounting screws are supplied. The drive was recognized by my PC’s BIOS and by Windows and the DMA checkbox was checked by default. Which is good.
The drive has no separate “play” button on its front panel – only “Eject”, volume control and a headphone jack. I couldn’t care less, since I have another CD-ROM drive. Because I already have a CD-ROM drive I didn’t use the supplied audio cable (for connection to the sound card) and the IDE cable. The CD-RW drive is now the secondary master and my CD-ROM is a secondary slave. In other words, I put both on the secondary channel, leaving the primary channel for my hard drive.
I normally use Adaptec/Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum and Nero Burning ROM (for XVCD). The EZ CD Creator needed to be updated to the 5.3 version to be able to recognize this drive (prior to that it refused to find a CD-Recorder and thought this was a regular CD-ROM drive). But after the update (available from the Roxio web site), the drive was recognized and the “Buffer Underrun Prevention” as well as “Write CD-Text” (latter in the DAO – “disc at once” mode) options appeared.
The drive has buffer underrun prevention, which a cool feature that helps you avoid making nice-looking coasters. When the buffer (this model has 2 Mb) gets low, it stops the recording until more data is available. Older CD-Recorders would just ruin the CD.
In my test with an Audio CD, the drive extracted audio at 15x. Since my CD-ROM drive can only extract at 7x-8x, I made a copy of a 60-minute audio CD in little less than 7 minutes. That was much better than my old CD-RW drive that could only burn at 4x (when the weather is good, otherwise only 2x).
By the way, the drive is being identified by my BIOS and Windows as Lite-On brand.
The Nero Burning ROM, supplied with this drive, offered me to uninstall my older Nero version and then installed itself. It works fine as well.
Bottom Line
Overall, I am very pleased with the drive so far. And for only $19 (provided I get the mail-in rebates), it is a very good value.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 69-20-30=$19
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
dkozin
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 in Electronics |
 - Top 10 |
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Location: California
Reviews written: 838
Trusted by: 516 members
About Me:
I love to push buttons on electronic (audio and video) equipment. It makes me happy.
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