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The TDK CD WRITER - TDK BURNS THE COMPETITION
AS WELL
The new TDK firewire CD-rewritable 24x10x40x veloCD is the first external
CD burner that I actually would want to put on my desk. Immediately, the
clean lines, and midnight blue LED pipe tube strike you – and you
no longer have an aversion to an external drive. This is one stunningly
beautiful unit!
CD burners have been out now for a number of years, so the
basics are well known. However, Firewire is a new advance that we were
anxious to test. The veloCD uses an IEEE 1394 port or an IEEE 1394 PCI
card. As the test PC [PIII 800MHz] did not have a Firewire port, our first
action was to purchase a $30 1394-PCI card. Installation of the card was
simple, and the plug & play architecture smoothly integrated the system
into the PC’s operating system (WinXP). Total time to set-up (including
loading all the accompanying software) was less than 20 minutes. Please
note that the drive is also MAC compatible, although our tests were run
on a PC. The veloCD comes with Roxio Toast 5.0 Standard (Mac), Ahead Nero
5.5 (PC), TDK Digital MixMaster (PC), and InCD CD-RW packet writing software
(PC).
 As
we began our testing, we immediately noticed that the previous bias against
“slow” external CDs has been eliminated by the Firewire technology.
We tested the veloCD against two internal drives – a 12x6x32x and
a 24x10x40x internal. Our time trials noted virtually no difference in
the internal and external 24x10x40x drives.
SmartBURN technology - In burning CDs, one of the common
complaints has been that CD drives occasionally incur the dreaded “BUFFER
OVERRUN ERROR” and leave the poor user with a half-burned and therefore
useless disk. We have experienced this phenomenon several times in burning
both audio and data CDs. Recently, the addition of a 2MB buffer and hardware/software
fixes have essentially eliminated this frustrating aspect of CD burning.
TDK uses the SmartBURN technology to provide a buffer Underrun protection
feature. If you don’t have this technology and are fed up with getting
errors, then it is time to upgrade – NOW!
We tested creating several data and audio (Wav and MP3)
CDs, and also created a IN-CD virtual drive using a CD-RW disk. Velocd
supports Track-at-Once, Disc-at-Once, Multisession, Fixed and Variable
Packet Writing.
We were immediately impressed with the speed of creating
a full-CD. We also used the audio rip to take several tracks from a music
CD - with the 40x rip (digital audio extraction) speed, veloCD transferred
an audio track from CD to hard drive in 5 seconds! A complete data CD
was created in 4 minutes!
Summary – An external CD is a decision
which we avoided because previous units: (1) looked like junky boxes;
and (2) worked slower. The new TDK veloCD 24x10x40x erases all prejudices
against an external CD. It is cleanly and beautifully designed, and the
performance is excellent. The new buffer underrun protection eliminates
the major headache of older systems. Anyone thinking of an external drive
MUST look at this unit – and fall in love.
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10 / 10 |
OVERALL SCORE
94%
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9 / 10 |
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9 / 10 |
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10 / 10 |
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9 / 10 |
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9.4 / 10 |
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