Burn Baby Burn
Written: Apr 07 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Good value, fast, SCSI is made for CD-Rs
Cons: Cost of SCSI card for people new to the format
|
|
|
| stevelarrison's Full Review: Hewlett Packard CD-Writer Plus 9200i CD-RW Burner |
Hewlett Packard has a well deserved reputation for quality. This CD-RW is evidence of that quality. This drive has everything that you could want in a CD-RW. Here is a quick run down of what you get, and why it is important.
First of all Speed: The 9200 series is a 32x/8x/4x drive. That is, it plays CDs at 32 x speed, records on CD-R media at 8x speed, and records on CD-RW media at 4x speed. When you are shopping for a CD-R or CD-RW, go for something that will write CD-R at 8x, trust me, burning CDs is a slow process on a 2x drive. I recently retired a perfectly good drive for this reason. 8x is about as fast as it gets for recording speeds.
Interface: SCSI-2. If you are reading this review and don't know what SCSI is, do some research before buying this drive. SCSI interfaces are not standard equipment on most computers, they require a separate interface controller card. There are several advantages to having a SCSI controller card. A SCSI device is less resource intensive for the CPU than an IDE device, so the CPU is not too bogged down to burn a CD while doing other tasks. The only real downside is cost, if you don't already have a SCSI-2 card, plan on spending around $150 to $200 on a good SCSI card.
Buffer Size 4MB - Enough memory to store 11.5 seconds od data at 2x speed. This is a decent size buffer for a CD burner.
Included with the burner is Adaptec Direct CD and Easy CD creator. This is a fairly decent package that seems to be bundled with just about every CD burner out there. and a few other packages that you may or may not use. I personally didn't find it worthwhile to install Corel Print Office.
I would highly recommend this burner to anyone looking for a SCSI CD-RW. It is a very high quality burner that offers good performance at a surprisingly low price. (available for $238 on buy.com on date of review). The only real drawback is the requirement for SCSI, this may not be worth the expense to you if you don't already have a SCSI based system.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
stevelarrison
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Member: Steve Larrison
Location: Scottsdale, Az. USA
Reviews written: 171
Trusted by: 198 members
About Me:
Beer, the answer to, and the cause of all life's problems.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.