Reviews / previews
If you're in the market for a drive to burn your own CDs, consider taking this Hi-Val CD-ReWriteable for a spin. With 24x read and 4x write and rewrite, it can write a full CD in less than half an hour and, at $183, it costs less than a lot of slower drives.
The E-IDE drive was easy to install. We simply removed our old CD-ROM drive and attached the CD-RW drive to all the cables and inserted it into the same bay.
Unfortunately, at boot-up, we noticed that the new drive had been labeled the D: drive by Windows - previously our second hard drive. We found that the Hi-Val drive had been set to Master as default--an unusual setting for a CD-ROM drive. After resetting the jumpers to Slave, we were back in business.
The speedy little drive was able to burn a full CD-recordable disk in less than 30 minutes. Even CD-RW, slower than CD-R, was swift. We were able to move over 300 MB of assorted files onto a formatted CD-RW disk in only 23 minutes. Not bad for a large backup. (Of course, it still takes the 50 to 90 minutes to format a CD-RW disk for write and rewrite.) If you spend the bucks for media capable of higher speeds, then even faster times will be seen.
We would have liked to see a better bundle with the CD-RW drive. It does ship with the child-protection software Cyber Patrol as well as Printmaster Gold in addition to the standard copiers EZ CD Creator and Direct CD from Adaptec. But the drive only comes with one blank CD, and it's a CD-recordable disk that can't be rewritten.
But apart from our installation glitches and this minor gripe, we were impressed with the CD-RW's performance. It's fast, quiet, and inexpensive - just what you want to see in your CD-recordable drives.-- Joel Strauch / GamePro
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