This burner should burn
Written: Feb 15 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fairly fast
Cons: High unreliability, poor manufacturing
The Bottom Line: This drive is a very bad investment. It's reliability and construction are very questionable
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| sidious81's Full Review: Ricoh Internal CD-RW drive |
I must say, even now I'm still bitter about the effectiveness of my Ricoh CD/RW, or lack thereof. I got the drive in the winter of 1999, and after a very easy installation, I was, at the time very impressed with it. This particular drive was a 6x write/4x rewrite/24x read drive, and I set out immediately to test it out.
In the beginning, the drive performed perfect burns for both CD-R's and CD-RW's every time, and to me seemed quite fast. As reading goes, even though it was slower than dedicated CD-ROMS, it really wasn't too bad.
The problems with this drive crept up so slowly, that I didn't even notice them very much until it was too late. As time went on, periodically the drive would fail during a burn, even after performing a test write. The most common problem was a buffer underrun, after which the drive was unusable until I restarted my computer. After a few of these, I started making CD images to burn onto new CD's so that the transfer didn't have to occur between my two CD drives. My second drive was a 40x, so I was pretty sure that this wasn't the problem, but there's no point in tempting fate, is there? This seemed to solve the problem....for a while. The same errors started occurring again during burns, along with errors relating to invalid instructions being sent to the burner. This was occurring even on things such as system back-up's at times.
Finally, the drive just stopped burning altogether, and anytime a CD was even placed into the drive just to read, the entire system would freeze up. At this point I called technical support at Ricoh, which was less than helpful.
During this period of time, it sounded like the cd drive could not focus on any disc placed in it. There was a audible, cyclic clicking coming from the drive, which in my opinion was probably coming from the lens moving around, trying to focus on the disc.
My problems extended to the point where even having the drive connected to my computer would cause the system to hang. I simply just had to completely remove the drive from my computer.
Just to put this in perspective, I had this drive for less than a year, and burned at the very most 25 cd's on it. Wear and tear? I think not.
Since then I've installed a new, Iomega ZipCD drive, and have had no problems ever with it's operation. This basically shows how unreliable the Ricoh CD-RW drive really is.
Now that I've completed my rant, here are some of the more technical aspects of the burner.
Speed: 6x write/4x rewrite/24x read
Accompanying software: Easy CD Creator 4
-------As a note on this: The Easy CD Creator software works quite well, but it can take some time to figure out. It isn't exactly the most user-friendly software on the market.
UDMA support
Support for 700mb cd's
I cannot recommend this drive to anyone, as I've experienced quite possibly the worst problems anyone has ever experienced with a CD-RW drive.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
sidious81
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Member: Joe Kesler
Location: Cincinnati, OH, USA
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
I'm a college student attending the University of Cincinnati, majoring in Computer Engineering.
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