Ricoh 7063A or should I say Cendyne ?
Written: Mar 10 '01 (Updated Mar 10 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap, works as promised ;-)
Cons: No burnproof, telephone support didn't help
The Bottom Line: A cheap drive, which can be found below $100. It is very reliable, because so far all cheap "brandless" CDRs I fed to it didn't cause a problem.
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| vpinion's Full Review: Ricoh Internal CD-RW drive |
Purchase
I bought this CD writer last november for a friend at Amazon. It was advertized as a Cendyne 32x6x4x (Read, write, rewrite) and came in full retail packaging with cables, screws and the excellent writing software Nero Burning Rom V.5.
Installation
Once installed it would immediately report as Ricoh 7063A, the illusion of a Cendyne brand is gone, they don't even try to hide the "true" brand.
Installing a CD-writer is easy, you just select if it is a master or slave drive, connect the IDE and power-cable and you are done. In case you are not familiar with that procedure you will find it described in the manual that comes in the box.
I installed many dozens of CD-writers and I never had a problem and first it appeared to work properly, but then it wouldn't start writing a CD. The computer of my friend is a Gateway Pentium II/450 tower and after trying everything I decided to test it in my own machine (Duron 900 on Epox 8KTA) and it worked immediately. My old Mitsumi 8x4x writer worked immediately in that Gateway machine... Hm...
Support
Called Gateway-support: "Sorry, we don't sell Cendyne/Ricoh writers, you should buy the writers Gateway is recommending so we don't support your problem".
Called Cendyne: First answer: "Call Gateway!" Then I insisted to get help from him so he started giving some tips and I could answer "I tried that already" on all tips, since I am doing more or less the same job than he does. Then he became mad and hung up!! And I waited like 10 mins to get a support person on the line.
Facit: This Gateway motherboard is not compatible with this drive. For what reason I don't know, I updated BIOS, firmware... nothing helped.
Facit2: If you need support, hope you get a friendlier person. I would not generalize that their support is bad, since I called only once.
Using the drive
Now the pleasant part. The drive behaves very well, be it as CD drive or as a writer. No problems with those 80min/700mb CDs. A 700 Mb CD is written in 13 minutes. The faster 12x drives on the market have a burn-proof so you can use your computer full load while burning a CD. This burner doesn't have that feature, so better go to the refrigerator or toilet while you are writing a CD, but don't use your computer to much, other wise you might get a buffer underrun. Once you have a buffer underrun you can throw the CDR away and start again.
I am using the cheapest CDRs on the market and I am using 4x CDRs at 6x or 8x and haven't produced a coaster yet. Very good!
There is even a possibility to convert this drive to an 8x burner, but this will kill your warranty and is also a little dangerous for the drive. Beginners beware. So I wont explain further, search the Internet for more info if you insist. I did it and it works well ;-)
Software
Nero burning rom has good wizards to make this drive easy to use for the beginner and "behind" those wizards also TONS of parameters for the advanced user. Good choice, if you compare it with other value-bundles...
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
vpinion
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Location: Virginia, USA
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
I have a computer hotline with emergency service and I am also selling computer hardware.
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