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[Editor's note: This is part one of
a three part series on the OWC CDRW drive. The next
parts will discuss specifications, and working with
iTunes, Toast and Retrospect, among other things.]
As some of you Applelust readers may
be aware from some of my previous
articles, I am pretty old school when it comes
to computers. Remember when Al Pacino in The Scent
of a Woman asked for a John Daniels on the rocks,
and when his aide corrected him by saying, "Sir, don't
you mean a *Jack* Daniels?" And Al Pacino said, "Son,
when you know him as well as I do, you call him John?"
Well, let's just say that I am a big fan of Chuck
Babbage.
I have always, always, been very fastidious
regarding my backups, be it on punched paper tape
(wha?), IBM punch cards (huh?), 8.5" floppy disks
(doh!), 3.5" floppy disks (hmmm...), Zip disks (ahhh...),
or an external hard drive (duh.). The thought of a
CD burner never really got my attention, for two reasons,
speed and dependability. I mean, sure, I thought,
I might get into making audio CDs. But could I really
use a CD burner for backup? Would it be fast enough?
And all of this talk about buffer underrun seemed
like a joke to me. OK, so maybe if someone got a pop
on an audio CD, that would merely be an annoyance.
But to actually use a device to go through the process
of making a backup, and then wonder if the device
actually *had* made the backup? Or have the device
repeatedly fail in the process of making the backup?
Unpredictably? Excuuuuuuse me. Forgetaboutit.
So, you could imagine my excitement
when I got the chance to review the OWC
24x10x40 Mercury Pro Oxford911 Plextor FireWire External
CD-RW Drive (OWC241040PXFW), which, at the time of
this writing, includes all cables and Roxio Toast
Lite version 5.0, and costs US$299.95 after a US$30
rebate. Could everything that I wanted in a CD burner
have finally come together? Could the CD planets finally
have come into laser-like alignment? Could this be
the dawning of the age of Burnarious?
Holy Uranus, quite possibly so. Right
out of the box, quite frankly, I have never been more
impressed with the quiet strength of any high tech
gadget.
(As you can tell from
my description on the right, the case and front
panel of the OWC drive that I received varies
superficially from the equally attractive unit
depicted above. Mine does not have the OWC and
FireWire logos on the top, the power button
is slightly different, and the feet on my drive
are a different color and more rounded. This
graphic was taken from the OWC web site.)
The OWC drive arrived mounted in an
attractive Universal translucent grey plastic external
storage enclosure, whose jet black front panel has
a power button with a green power on LED, the door
for the sliding CD tray, an eject button, an activity
LED, and a mini headphone jack with volume control.
The rear panel houses two FireWire ports, stereo RCA
output jacks, and the power cord connector. The activity
LED is green when power is on and there is a disc
in the drive, yellow when initializing or reading
from the disc, and blinking orange when writing to
the disc.
The case itself has eight dark blue
rubber bumpers, two on the bottom that serve as feet,
and two on the top to facilitate stacking. Good to
their claim, OWC included a 6' three-prong power cord,
and a 6' FireWire cable. Top it off with being able
to see the grey metal case of the drive itself though
the translucent sides and top of the external enclosure,
and this drive looks professional, reliable, functional,
and just plain pretty. I mean, even the FireWire cable
looks and feels above average in quality (seriously),
six feet for both is a nice, generous, nonrestrictive
length, and the minijack, volume control, stereo output
jacks, and dual FireWire ports are a nice attention
to detail.
The good looks of this drive are not
just skin deep, either. Plextor has had one of the
best reputations in the industry for quality, technical
innovation, and performance since their first SCSI
CD-ROM drive over a decade ago. Basically, if any
CD-RW drive can do it, Plextor can do it.
And gone are the days when you must
start a CD burn and then tiptoe away with your fingers
crossed. With Plextor's BURN-proof technology, coasters
due to the dreaded buffer underrun error are effectively
a thing of the past. I mean, you can even continue
to surf the web while you are burning a CD, try *that*
with any CD burner without buffer underrun protection.
Not that you will have that much time to surf the
web, mind you, because this drive is just so blazingly
fast.
Setup could not have been easier. Load
Toast Lite, which in and of itself has one of the
most attractive and easiest installation procedures
that I have ever encountered, let the installer automatically
restart your Mac for you, plug the drive into the
wall, turn it on, plug in the FireWire cable, and
you're burnin', baby...you are so HOT!
The drive, weighing in at 5.8 pounds,
feels surprising heavy, but that just instilled more
confidence in me that this was a sturdy and reliable
unit. The drive does have a continuously running fan,
and definitely makes some noise when it is whirring
away at 24x, but quite frankly, I don't care.
This being my first CD-RW, playing with
this drive has been an interesting experience. For
example, right out of the box with the default Toast
Lite settings, I was able to burn a 49:44 minute audio
CD in 14:09 with my Pismo 500Mhz. But, by upgrading
to Toast Titanium and fiddling with parameters, I
discovered that the actual rate that this drive could
burn that CD was in 3:03. And this is with this off
brand 50 pack of 24x CD-Rs that I got at Fry's Electronics
for US$9.50 no less. And without a single coaster
in the mix. Interesting, huh?
So, if you are in the market for a CD-RW,
you appreciate quality, and Santa knows that you have
been nice, keep your fingers crossed, and stay tuned
to see how this drive performs in my more detailed
performance tests to follow, because everything about
the OWC 24x10x40 Mercury Pro Oxford911 Plextor FireWire
External CD-RW looks like a winner.
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