Burn Baby Burn!
Written: Dec 12 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap,Cheap,Cheap and probably the second best IDE CD-RW drive
Cons: Ricoh not known for CD recorder drives
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| sharky's Full Review: Ricoh Internal CD-RW drive |
This Ricoh drive is cheap and effective. It comes in two flavours: MP7040A (the retail value) and the RW7040A (the cheaper OEM equivalent). The biggest problem is the manufacturer name. Ricoh simply doesn't have the prestige or popularity of Plextor or the advertising campaign funding of HP. The drive comes with almost no outward markings beyond the words Compact Disc Recordable/ReWritable on the front and is actually the same drive sold by other CD-R/CD-RW companies under different names.
At 4X write, this drive takes about 18 minutes to record the data for a full disc and about 1 minute for a Table Of Content write. It has a 2Mb buffer and rarely runs into a buffer underrun. CD-RW capabilities are certainly useful for large storage and transfer of temporary documents as most 24X Read CD-Rom drives will read them (Multi-read supported drives). If you want to join your friends who all have CD writers or if you just need to backup your files, this is a very good and cheap option. The software it comes with might not be the best but it definitely is easy to use. 4X CD-RW writing requires 4X cd-rw's (which only Yamaha seems to be producing at last check).
Problems with this drive usually occur with too many authoring softwares are installed. The installation is simple if you have a remaining IDE spot left (generally 4 to start with and subtract one for each CD-Rom drive and hard drive).
Tech Support lines are open for longer than average business hours and respond on average in 5-15 minutes. Thru E-mail, the tech support is surprisingly fast, responding in less than a day or two. Suggestions are to Flash the ROM if you are having any problems with new updates (generally found on the Taiwan Webpage). There have been rumours that this product CAN burn at 6X to CD-R's with a certain Flash update, but this sounds rather false/risky.
The only IDE drive I would recommend more would be the Yamaha 4416 drive (if you have the money and want to spend the extra $60) and then it's all midrange SCSI drives from there on.
With CD-R media prices at an all time low, now is a great time to purchase this product.
--Pirana.S
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
sharky
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Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 6 members
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