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Product: OWC 24x10x40 Mercury
Pro Oxford911 Plextor FireWire CD-RW Drive Company: Other World Computing Web:eshop.macsales.com Contact: sales@macsales.com Category: Hardware, data storage, and backup
Price: $299.95 Requirements: 233 MHz PPC G3 processor, Mac
OS 8.5.1 or higher, FireWire drivers and interface,
CD ROM, 100 MB free hard disk space (for Toast Titanium)
OS X Plans: N/A Rating: (pending part three of this review)
This is part two of a three part review of the OWC
24x10x40 Mercury Pro Oxford911 Plextor FireWire CD-RW
Drive. In part
one, I basically wanted to give all of you Applelust
readers that might have been looking for one heck
of a stocking stuffer a heads up to what appeared
to be a fantastic product. In this review, I will
provide you with hardware specifics about the drive,
and my experience with using the drive with Toast.
Part three of this review will discuss the drive's
performance with Retrospect, and assign the drive
a rating.
The OWC 24x10x40 Mercury Pro Oxford911 Plextor FireWire
CD-RW Drive uses the Plextor PX-W2410TA/SW mechanism.
It has an internal RAM buffer of 4 MB. CDs are loaded
into the device via a sliding tray. The drive supports
the following formats: CD-DA; CD-ROM (Mode 1); CD-ROM
XA (Mode 2: form 1 or form 2 and mixed form); CD-ROM
(Mixed Mode); Photo CD; VideoCD; CD-I (MPEG movies);
CD-Extra (CD-Plus); CD+G; and CD Text. The drive can
operate in the following recording modes: Track-At-Once,
Disc-at-Once, Session-at-Once, Multisession, and Incremental
packet writing (fixed and variable packets). Packet
writing is required for Retrospect support, and while
I have yet to test it, this drive is listed as supported
in the Retrospect
database. And, lastly, the drive has a BURN-proof
technology which permits it to recover from the dreaded
buffer underrun error.
This drive is fast, and one of the tradeoffs for
obtaining that performance is noise. The drive has
an internal fan that runs continuously, and a whir
can most definitely be heard when the drive revs up
to full speed on a burn or a read operation. Personally,
I did not find the noise objectionable at all, and
if that is the price for this kind of speed and reliability,
so be it. And, as mentioned in part one, setup was
a snap, basically, load Toast Lite, Restart, plug
in the power and FireWire cables, and you are up and
running.
My first tests were with burning an audio CD from
MP3's on my Pismo 500 MHz internal hard drive. With
all Toast Lite settings set to their defaults, I was
able to burn a 49 minute 44 second audio CD in 14
minutes and 9 seconds using 24x CD-R media. This did
not seem that fast to me, so I started fiddling with
the Toast parameters.
A very significant jump in speed was obtained when
I set the Toast preferences to Prefer Disc-At-Once,
which this drive supports. This basically turns the
laser on an leaves it on for the duration of the burn.
I was able to record the same 49 minute 44 second
audio CD in 5 minutes 18 seconds. Now I was getting
somewhere. But, still, I felt that there was more
speed to be had. I tried upping the size of the Toast
RAM cache to 64 MB, and found that the burn times
actually got longer, as in worse. So, the obvious
thing to try was making the Toast RAM cache as small
as possible. With a setting of just 1 MB, I was able
to burn the same 49 minute 44 second audio CD in just
4 minutes 44 seconds, even though I could tell from
the drive's status LED that the buffer underrun protection
was constantly kicking in.
On reflection, this increase in performance is explainable.
It basically means that the Plextor BURN-proof technology
is able to resync the drive mechanism and resume a
burn in less time that it takes my Pismo to fill and
then empty a large RAM cache, since my Pismo was still
not able to keep up with this drive on an audio CD
burn at 24x, regardless of RAM cache size. So, while
I have not seen it documented elsewhere, it may very
well be the case that CD burners with buffer underrun
protection actually benefit from small Toast-side
RAM caches. It all depends on how quickly the drive
can recover from a buffer underrun. This drive can
do it quickly, and very quietly. I would be curious
to hear about the experiences that other Applelust
readers have had with this.
These are the Toast parameters that worked the best
for me with this drive:
In order to see just how fast the drive could go,
I upgraded to Toast 5 Titanium ($89.95 at the Roxio
web store) and created a disc image of the same audio
CD (disc images cannot be created with Toast Lite).
Creating the disc image basically got all of the CPU
processing done up front, and permitted my Pismo to
feed data to the drive as fast as it could take it.
With a disc image, I was able to burn the same 49
minute 44 second audio CD in 3 minutes 3 seconds.
Not bad. Not bad at all. And all of the audio CDs
that I burned played flawlessly in all five of the
audio CD players that I own, one of which is over
ten years old.
While I do intend to do all of my data backup with
Retrospect Express ($16.95 from OWC when you purchase
a qualified drive such as this one), I did try making
a 700 MB Mac/PC Hybrid Disc image just for grins.
I was able to burn the disc image on 24x CD-R media
in 4 minutes 25 seconds, and verify it in 2 minutes
37 seconds. That is in 7 minutes 2 seconds total.
Plextor suggests that you use certified 24x CD-R
media from Taiyo Yuden, Ricoh, or Mitsui Chemicals
to insure 24x speeds. I was using two 50 per stack
cakeboxes of off-brand HOTAN 24x CD-R media that I
found at Fry's Electronics for $9.50 a box. The drive
performed flawlessly for the first 75 burns, and then
ran into some problems, which, upon physical inspection,
I am 100% certain was due to defective media. I mean,
I could actually see the physical imperfections in
the dye layer with the naked eye along the outer edge
of the rejected discs. Dropping down to 16x or in
some cases 12x resulted in successful burns, but I
still ended up with a few coasters. This was not
because of the drive. In fact, I take this drive's
stellar performance with this off-brand media to be
a tribute to its precision. But, I did learn that
more expensive media costs more for a reason.
So, what with excellent Toast performance and the
sweet taste of an early lead, it is off to Retrospect.
Stay tuned for part three, coming soon to an Applelust
review near you.
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