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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: 4 bounces -
Pure Lust
Ratings Legend
One Bounce: Lustless
This product is uninspiring and not only lacks lust
appeal, but it also lacks even the possibility of lust-production.
Two Bounces: Lack-Luster
If you need what it is that this product does, look
elsewhere or wait, it lacks lust-appeal.
Three Bounces: Lustworthy
A few rough spots here and there, but overall a high
quality item worthy of lust.
Four Bounces: Pure Lust
Unalloyed lust.
This is the final part 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 part
two, I discussed some of the hardware specifics
and my experience with using the drive with Toast
Titanium. In this final review, I will discuss my
experience with using this drive with Retrospect Express,
and assign the drive an overall rating.
I have always thought that for backup I would use
CD-RW (rewritable) media as opposed to CD-R (write
once) media; being able to reuse the media of a prior
backup made perfect sense. For this reason, once I
obtained Dantz's Retrospect Express 4.3 ($16.95 from
OWC when you purchase a qualified drive such as this
one) I bought some off brand GQ 10x CD-RW media, and
ran some tests. GQ, by the way, stands for Great Quality.
Don't know if you have had the experience, but way
back in grade school, I went door to door selling
the "World's Finest Chocolate" brand of candy. Somehow,
there is something about the brand name of a product
containing a superlative being a clear indication
that the product itself is not. I have had quite a
few coasters with the GQ discs, most definitely due
to defective media, and not due to buffer overrun
errors. Again, I do not fault the Plextor for this
one bit (no pun intended). In fact, the recommended
Verbatim discs supplied with the Plextor have all
burned perfectly.
To compare the write and read speeds of CD-R vs.
CD-RW media, I first burned a 655 MB Toast Titanium
disc image using the HOTAN 24x CD-R media mentioned
in part two. I was able to burn the disc in 4 minutes
and 10 seconds, and verify it in 2 minutes and 29
seconds. To confirm the actual write and read speeds,
I compared the ratio of the speeds (24x/40x) with
the ratio of the times (2:29/4:10) and they did in
fact check out:
24x/40x = 0.6
2:29/4:10 = 0.6
So, since Toast Titanium believes that it is writing
the disc at 24x, we can assume that Toast Titanium
is able to read the disc at 40x. Given that, I wrote
and verified the same 655 MB Toast Titanium disc image
using the GQ and the Verbatim 10x CD-RW media. In
both cases, I was able to burn the disc in 8 minutes
and 17 seconds, and verify it in 3 minutes and 7 seconds.
Note that it took longer to verify (read) the CD-RW
media than it did to verify the CD-R media.
Given that the HOTAN CD-R media was written at 24x
and read at 40x, we can calculate the speeds for the
GQ and Verbatim CD-RW media:
24x*4:10/8:17 = 12.1x (speed of writing 655 MB
w/GQ and Verbatim CD-RW media)
40x*2:29/3:07 = 31.9x (speed of reading 655 MB
w/GQ and Verbatim CD-RW media
Note that these values are for comparison only, as
there are non media related factors (such as load
and seek time) that come into play. But, as a result
of these tests, the primary realization that I came
to was that if you are going to spend top dollar for
a Plextor drive, and if you are going to use it for
backup, which means that you are likely going to use
it on a daily basis, then why use it most of the time
with both its write and read performance hobbled by
CD-RW media? This argument is compounded by the fact
that CD-RW media costs about three times that of CD-R
media. Besides, would you really want to throw away
an old backup when a CD-R disc can be had for as little
as 25 cents? And, do you really want to inventory
two different kinds of media, CD-RW for backups and
CD-R for audio discs? Remember that most audio CD
players cannot read CD-RW media.
For all of the above reasons, I decided to use CD-R
media for my backups, and effectively ignore CD-RW
media in its entirety. It is 24x40 for me, all the
way.
And so, it was onward to Retrospect Express.
The Plextor performed very well with Retrospect Express,
once I got over the first of many Retrospect Express
obfuscations. When I first installed Retrospect Express
and started it up, I was told that "no supported backup
devices were found." I had the Retrospect 4.3 Driver
Update installed, so what was wrong? I figured that
it was a Toast Titanium extension conflict, and spent
quite a bit of time juggling FireWire extensions in
an attempt to get the Plextor working.
Well, it ends up being that the "4.3" in the "Retrospect
4.3 Driver Update" is not the version of the driver
update, it is the version of Retrospect that the driver
update updates (trying saying that three times fast).
So, the very first thing that you need to do when
you get Retrospect Express for use with this drive
is to make sure that you have no less than version
2.4.103 of the 4.3 driver update installed in the
same folder as the Retrospect Express application
itself (the driver update is not a Mac OS system extension).
If you do not have at least this version (the copy
on the Retrospect Express CD-ROM that I received from
OWC contained version 2.1), you need to go to the
Retrospect
web site, download the latest Retrospect 4.3 Driver
Update, and place it in the Retrospect Express Folder,
pronto.
(Note: While installing version 2.4.103 of the 4.3
driver update resulted in Retrospect Express recognizing
the Plextor 24/10/40, and while the drive is listed
as supported for Windows on the Dantz web site, the
drive is not yet officially listed as supported for
the Mac.)
Once the driver update was installed, the Plextor
performed admirably, and I was rewarded with high
performance backups and restores. Though I found Retrospect
Express riddled with counterintuitiveness, I soon
looked the other way and got all warm and fuzzy knowing
that all versions of the files are kept in a backup
set, i.e., that Retrospect Express is not a disk mirroring
application. This further supported my decision to
use CD-R media; basically, once you start using Retrospect
Express, you can have all versions of everything that
you have ever done in backup. I plan to keep adding
to my backup set for quite some time, say, until my
CD case fills up (50 discs), at which point I will
store them away in an old cakebox and start over.
Which brings up two additional very important points
that Retrospect Express sadly obfuscates.
First of all, while your supplied Retrospect Express
CD-ROM is set up to act as a startup disc in the event
of a catastrophic failure of your hard disk, recall
that that disc contains the wrong version of the driver
update. SURPRISE! Were your hard disk in ruins, you
would not be able to access the Plextor drive by simply
starting up from the Retrospect Express CD-ROM that
Dantz has supplied you. This means that in the event
of you being unable to startup from your hard disk,
you would not be able to startup Retrospect Express
from the CD-ROM and backup your hard disk to the Plextor
before proceeding. You would also not be able to access
the Plextor to do a restore. Oops. How did that one
slip through the cracks?
Secondly, even when you tell Retrospect Express to
backup all of your files with the "All Files" selector,
Retrospect Express doesn't. That's right, it does
not backup all of your files, in that it does not
backup the catalog, i.e., the "index" to your backup
set, which is kept on your hard drive, typically within
the Retrospect Express application folder. The logic
of this omission is that the contents of the catalog
is not known until the backup operation is complete,
but surely there are ways around this, e.g., the catalog
could always be the last file written on the last
disc of the backup set.
Logic aside, the dire consequence of this omission
is that in the event of a catastrophic failure of
your hard disk, you will be forced to recreate the
catalog of the backup set by feeding each and every
disc of it into Retrospect Express, after which you
will have to feed each and every disc in again in
order to perform the actual backup. If your backup
set is physically distributed over a large number
of discs, this could take you hours upon hours huddled
in front of your Plextor in a stressed out condition
feeding discs into it like a trained monkey.
Two problems, two solutions.
You can solve the first problem by creating a copy
of the Retrospect Express startup disc capable of
accessing the Plextor. While there are a number of
ways of doing this, what follows is a description
of how to do it with Toast Titanium. Follow this procedure
after you have both Retrospect Express and Toast Titanium
properly installed and operational with your Plextor
drive, but before you have any hard disk problems:
(1) Open Toast Titanium.
(2) Create a temporary Toast Titanium 650 MB partition.
(3) Mount the original Retrospect Express 4.3 CD-ROM.
(4) Drag the Retrospect Express 4.3 icon from the
desktop to the temporary partition. The temporary
partition will now contain a folder by the name
of "Retrospect Express 4.3". Dismount the original
CD-ROM, and double click on the folder to open it.
(5) Replace all of the copies of the file "Retrospect
4.3 Driver Update" with the version contained in
the Retrospect Express Folder on your hard disk.
There are a total of eight copies, two in each of
the language folders.
(6) Open the System Folder within the Retrospect
Express 4.3 folder.
(7) Drag the following files from the Extensions
folder within the System Folder on your hard disk
to the Extensions folder within the System Folder
within the Retrospect Express 4.3 folder, replacing
the two files that are there:
(a) FireWire Enabler
(b) FireWire Support
(8) Drag the file "FireWire Authoring Support"
from the Extensions (Disabled) folder within the
System Folder on your hard disk to the Extensions
folder within the System Folder within the Retrospect
Express 4.3 folder (if you are using Toast Titanium,
this extension will have been disabled as part of
the Toast Titanium installation procedure).
(9) Click on the Data window of Toast Titanium,
and select Mac OS as the disc type.
(10) Drag the Retrospect Express 4.3 folder to
the Data window. If you have followed this procedure,
the System Folder is already blessed.
(11) Burn the disc.
(12) Test the disc by starting up from it and seeing
if you can access your Plextor drive.
You can solve the second problem (the tedious recreation
of the catalog of your backup set) by simply creating
a second backup set. In this backup set, you would
use the selector "Retrospect Files." This is the easiest
(if not the only) way to get Retrospect Express to
backup a catalog file. That is right, if you labeled
the catalog "Hot" and then used the "Hot Items" file
selector, Retrospect Express would not backup the
catalog. Like I said, obfuscating.
While this second backup set will not contain its
own catalog file, it will contain, among other things,
the catalog file of your primary backup set. Every
time that you perform a primary backup, perform this
secondary backup immediately afterwards. Setting up
a separate Retrospect Express script for each of the
backups makes this a simple and straightforward procedure
to follow. Now, in the event of a catastrophic failure
of your hard drive, you can easily retrieve the catalog
of your primary backup set by simply recreating the
catalog of this second, much smaller "catalog" backup
set, and then restoring the primary backup set's catalog
from it. Hours upon hours saved, greatly reduced stress
level.
So, how does all of this add up in the eyes of this
reviewer?
The OWC 24x10x40 Plextor FireWire CD-RW is a wonderfully
crafted, high quality device that is a joy to use
and just oozes quality. It performed splendidly in
all of its tests. The only potential downside for
some might be the constant fan noise, but since I
only turn on the drive when I am actually burning
a disc, that factor does not bother me one bit, and
if that is the price of speed and reliability, so
be it. The OWC 24x10x40 Plextor FireWire CD-RW costs
more than other drives, but you are clearly paying
for quality, reliability, performance, and Retrospect
compatibility. If you have the extra cash to burn
and a lot of discs to burn as well, you will be well
pleased. Highly recommended.
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