Make Your CD-R/W Drive into a Giant Floppy!
Written: May 12 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: DirectCD offers a transparent interface for drag and drop creating/copying
Cons: Can be a little slow on larger files. No Win2k support
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| mojobobo's Full Review: Roxio DirectCD 2.x |
Have you ever wanted to add just one file to your CD-R or RW disc but didn't want to burn an entire disc at the time? That's the motivation behind DirectCD. By allowing you to simply drag and drop files onto your CD-R/W drive's icon, DirectCD essentially allows you to treat your drive like a 650MB floppy disk. So what's the catch?
The first catch is speed. For this convenience to work, Adaptec had to sacrifice writing speed. This isn't that noticeable if you're just saving a Word Document to your disc, but if you're trying to save the latest 100MB+ game demo, then you'll be in for a bit of a wait. Sometimes it takes up to twice as long to use DirectCD as it would to use CD Creator, but typically my experience has been in the 1.2X to 1.5X longer.
The next issue is space. To use DirectCD, your CD-R/W disc has to be formatted, which unfortunately results in the loss of some storage space (anywhere up to 100MB, but usually much less). While the space lost is significant, keep in mind that what's left over is still over five times the size of a 100MB Zip Disk.
The last major issue is support. Currently Adaptec offers DirectCD support under Win9x and NT4, but not Win2k. However, Adaptec has stated that users who own Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe 4 will receive a free upgrade of DirectCD when it becomes available.
So what else is there to DirectCD? Not much. Like most user-friendly products, it works transparently to the user so much so that it is often taken for granted. While it's not perfect for every copying/creating job, it is an ideal solution for many circumstances and can be an essential tool for wanting to share files between users.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mojobobo
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Reviews written: 21
Trusted by: 1 member
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