From...

November 5, 1999
Web posted at: 10:10 a.m. EST (1510 GMT)

by Jon Jacobi

(IDG) -- The CD-RW market has been so volatile lately that each new edition of our Top 5 reflects a major shakeup. Fortunately, all the most recent changes are positive, starting with a huge $115 reduction in the price of Ricoh's speedy MediaMaster MP7060A. Now at $234 -- which means you get a 6X burner for not much more than you'd pay for units burning CD-Rs at 4X -- it's a clear Best Buy.

Frugal buyers will want to look at our number two model, the new LG Electronics CED-8042B, which offers sturdy design, solid 4X/4X (CD-R/CD-RW) performance, and round-the-clock support for just $180. Iomega's $209 ZipCD 650 rises up the chart thanks to the company's recent move to free unlimited technical support.

Professional users should be interested in Hewlett-Packard's CD-Writer Plus 9200i SCSI drive, the first drive we've reviewed that combines 8X CD-R and 4X CD-RW write speeds; its 32X read speed is another first for a rewriteable drive. Predictably, that added performance comes at a premium: At $399, this model is not for everyone. Meanwhile, our Best Buy last month, HP's $229 CD-Writer Plus 8200i, can't match its quick-moving competition and slips to fifth.

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Flexible portability

This month we also review the $329 Dual Port Backpack CD-Rewriter -- an improved version of Micro Solutions' rugged, portable CD-RW drive. It doesn't make our chart, and it doesn't have the overall performance and low cost required to be a mainstream choice, but the Dual Port Backpack CD-Rewriter is a great option for users who need a portable drive. It writes at full 4X/4X speed through the parallel port or its alternative PC Card interface; the latter connection should ensure notebook users faster-than-parallel-port reads.

Look what's coming

Last month, Smart and Friendly announced its 12X/4X/32X CD-RW drive, which it says will ship during the fourth quarter. No review units are available yet, but we'll review this and other 12X/4X products as they appear.

On the software front, more drives should start shipping with Adaptec's DirectCD 3.0, which provides compression for CD-RW and other improvements; it's bundled with the HP 9200i we looked at this month. For Mac users, Adaptec is also shipping Toast 4.0, which offers expanded drive support, support for MP3 files, and newly enhanced label-printing software.

How PC World tests

We test each drive with a Micron 433-MHz Celeron system equipped with 64MB of SDRAM, a 10GB hard disk, and a DVD-ROM drive. We use a Buslogic FlashPoint LT card to evaluate the SCSI drives, and we install the IDE drives as slaves to the DVD-ROM drive's master on the integrated IDE controller's secondary channel.

We create an image of the hard drive using PowerQuest's Drive Image software and use the image to restore the system to its original state after each test. We then install each drive, noting any difficulties, and load the bundled software for CD-R and CD-RW writing.

We test CD-ROM read performance with Testa Labs' CD-Tach 98 2.0 software, and we gauge CD-R performance by writing 430MB of data to CD-R twice: once from an image file and once on the fly.

We judge CD-RW packet-writing performance by copying a folder containing 100MB of files to a CD-RW disc three times: first to the newly formatted blank disc, again after deleting the files from the first copy operation, and finally by overwriting the files from the second operation.

Top 5 CD-rewritable drives

1. Ricoh MediaMaster MP7060A
2. LG Electronics CED-8042B
3. Iomega ZipCD 650
4. Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 9200i
5. Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 8200i

Beyond the top 5...

• Micro Solutions Dual Port Backpack CD-Rewriter

Jon L. Jacobi is a software developer and freelance writer in San Francisco.