The Bold and the BREAKABLE!
Written: May 15 '02
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Pros: When it works, it works well
Cons: The most breakable peripheral I've ever owned
The Bottom Line: This drive is fragile, safely operated only by the dainty. It is too easily breakable and incompatible with other software to be worthy of a recommendation.
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| jcgrow's Full Review: Iomega ZipCD CD-RW Burner |
Do you want to know how stupid I am? I've gotten 3 different Iomega Zip CD-RW drives in the last year. The problem: each one broke within 3 months of the time I started using it.
It sounds dumb, I know, but I really got a kick out of the Iomega zip drive that I used to use a few years back, so I assumed that Iomega also made a good CD-RW. Well, you know what they say assuming will make out of U and ME, right?
-- Going Bust --
The single greatest problem of the Zip CD-RW is that it goes bust at the slightest provocation. My first drive stopped working when a paperback sitting right next to it on a bookshelf fell over onto the drive from. Now, I'm not talking about a coffee table book or anything here. Picture a Penguins Classic copy of one of Shakespeare's plays and you'll get the picture. How embarrassing for Iomega: their drive was knocked out by a tap from a lightweight!
The next Iomega CD-RW drive I used stopped working for no reason that I could figure out. It had been in the same place since I set it up, without any novels to bother it, when one morning I put a blank CD-RW disc in, and I heard the death knell of any CD-RW drive: the ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk. I give Iomega some credit in that the sent me a replacement drive within a week, but my confidence was shot.
That's why I was trying so hard to be careful with my last Iomega CD-RW drive. I put it in a nice, safe location without any threatening neighbors, but wouldn't you know it, one morning while moving my keyboard, I tapped it with my mouse and sent it flying across the desk. Well, it didn't actually fly, and it only moved two inches, but I knew by then how sensitive these drives can be, so I was worried. My concerns were justified. Now, the drive won't even open up.
-- Incompatible, That's What You Are... --
The physical frailty of the Iomega CD-RW is bad enough. What's worse is the way that the Toast software that comes with it seems to fail the task whenever it is most necessary.
I work on my computer for a living. I do strategic consulting based on long, detailed interviews, so it's really important that the information stored on my hard drive be secure. I assumed that I could count on a CD-RW drive to create backups. I was wrong.
Just a few months ago, before the latest breakdown of my drive, my computer was having some problems with electrical regularity, so I decided to bring it in for repairs. Before I did so, I made 2 copies of my work files on CD-RW. That is, I thought I made 2 copies. It turned out that the files on the CD looked good, and were verified by the Toast software, but actually were completely useless garble. I've done my best to recover these files through various techniques on both mac and pc, but to no avail. My work is gone with the whim of the Iomega CD-RW drive.
Burning MP3s onto CDs has also been a problem. MP3s directly from CD or downloaded from Napster work fine, but for some reason, the Iomega drive does not correctly burn the MP3s I download through Gnutella, either as a data file or onto a music formatted CD. The files work great on my hard drive, but for some reason, they just don't make sense when they're burned onto a CD using the Toast software that comes with the Iomega CD-RW. Ack!
The Toast software also has some problems with incompatibility. I've had to turn off important system extensions just in order to burn CDs much more than once. Please, will someone just give me a good peripheral that doesn't require the planets to be in alignment in order to work?
-- What to Do? --
It confuses me that Iomega, which has been such a great company with its zip disks, hasn't bothered to make a CD-RW drive that can take care of itself and work reliably. I still love the idea of a CD-RW drive, but I've had it with Iomega's external drive. I'm waiting until I purchase my next computer to get an internal CD-RW drive, where it should be nice and projected from the the rigors of sitting on my desk.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 180
Operating System: Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
jcgrow
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Location: Trumansburg, New York, United States
Reviews written: 238
Trusted by: 50 members
About Me:
Editor of IrregularTimes.com, looking at the world at through an irregular lens.
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