Quality Burner at a Cheap Price, but Without Adequate Software.
Written: May 18 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Good price, good speed, fast and quiet.
Cons: Software stinks. Nothing really special about the drive.
The Bottom Line: Not a bad unit, but the unit is nothing special, and the free software stinks.
|
|
|
| grimjack2's Full Review: Sony CRX 1611 CD-RW Burner |
In any system I’ve ever built or bought, if it includes a CD burner, I make sure to also include a regular CD-ROM. One important reason is to make copying CDs much more convenient than having to first read the source CD into an image file on the hard drive, before switching CDs and writing the image back. But the main reason is that I don’t want to wear out a burner with constant reading of CDs in the drive. Burner’s used to cost hundreds of dollars more than readers, and until very recently couldn’t read anywhere near as fast. Considering how often most people play games with music on the CD, install software, or just play CDs in general, I don’t want to shorten the lifetime of my burner with anything but writing CDs.
Still, when my current two year old CD-ROM inexplicably went out (just after first installing Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which may have some serious copy protection), I decided to replace my read only drive with a burner. My game machine already had the standard reader and a DVD player. I have an older machine on my network that I use just for burning. The reason I chose to get a burner instead of just the reader is simply because of the cost. I figured that any reader would be around $50, and many burners are only $100. Now that my game machine is also my download machine, I figured for just $50 more it would be worth my time to not always have to copy my data over to burn on my other machine.
This Sony CD-RW was only $100 after a $30 rebate. It also reads at 40x, which is +8x better than the CD-ROM that I’m replacing it with. The two pieces of software I use to burn are Goldenhawk’s WinCDR and Adaptec EZ-CD Creator 4.0. I know there is an upgrade to Adaptec’s software and that it works with most burners, and is quickly updated. WinCDR, however, takes a little more time to work with the newest burners, and doesn’t work with them all. I decided to limit my choice only to drives on the WinCDR supported list. This actually only left me with three or four drives that I could easily buy in the price range I was looking for.
I assumed that the Sony CRX-1611 would be the best choice, but after installing and using it, I wonder if one of the HP 9000 series or the Pacific Digital 24x/10x/16x wouldn’t have been a better deal.
Normally I swear by Plextor drives, but the price was higher than I liked, and I wasn’t able to get one as fast as I would like that was also supported by my software.
The Sony CRX-1611 burns at 16x for a regular burnable CD-R, at 10x for a rewritable CD-RW, and it reads at 40x speed (6000 KB per sec). It doesn’t read at this speed consistently, but will reach 40x speed when reading from the innermost tracks. It appears that at the outermost tracks the speed will drop no lower than 14x. It has an average random stroke time of 150 ms
The burner supports Disc-at-Once, Track-at-Once, Session-at-Once as well as packet writing modes. It also comes with a one year limited warranty.
Installing the drive into Windows 98 was very easy. I rebooted the machine and Windows properly identified it without needing any driver or software installed. I couldn’t be happier with this part of the install!
The box says “Burn-Proof” which somehow doesn’t seem appropriate on a burner. It says that it comes with “worry free anti-buffer under-run technology”. Regardless, I still worry. It boasts being able to be used in a multitasking environment, but I'm still suspicious. When I'm burning, I don't let my machine do anything else. I can wait 6-12 minutes for the burn to continue.
Inside the box, besides the burner, also comes an EIDE cable, an audio cable, a user guide, a quick start guide, and 4 screws. The EIDE cable and audio cable are of high quality. The quick start guide is as well. It has clear pictures and easy instructions to follow. Installation should be easy even for those who aren’t too comfortable opening up their machines.
Unfortunately, where most burners I’ve seen come with at least the ‘light’ version of Adaptec’s industry standard software. Instead this Sony comes with some of the most worthless software I’ve ever used! Maybe it just suffers in comparison to what is more common, but this “B” software just doesn’t work very well for me.
The BHA software is apparently a Japanese creation. It has the very simple name of “B’s Recorder Gold”. The user manual is in PDF format on the included drive. When you copy a disc, it always creates a temporary file before it burns. Even if you are burning an .ISO file. This I couldn’t understand.
You also get two Arcsoft products on the CD. Arcsoft’s Photobase lets you make a CD catalog of pictures, slide shows, etc.. Pretty standard stuff, but not good enough to replace doing it manually, or with ACDSee. Arcsoft’s Photoshop is a moderately advanced picture editor. It isn’t as powerful as Adobe’s software, nor is it as convenient to use as Microsoft’s Picture It.
I do want to compliment the drive for two things. The first is that it is fast, and I don’t mean just reading and writing. When you install a CD it spins up and recognizes the drive within just a few seconds. I have used other readers and burners that take up to 10-12 seconds before you can access the drive. Not this one. The other thing I want to compliment it for is how quiet it is. It really is quiet when spinning, even at maximum speed. I know that the noise is dependent upon many factors like the thickness of the CD, and what part you are reading from could make a difference. And the same type of Sony drive bought at a different time could be louder, but mine seems very quiet as opposed to other drives I use.
It didn’t come with any blank CD-Rs like the Plextor does. And if you read my review of the Plextor 12x/10x/32x SCSI, you may remember that the reason I call that drive the Rolls Royce of burners is because it also comes with a little L-shaped pin just to remove CDs when the machine is off.
In brief, it isn’t a bad burner, but just doesn’t seem to have anything special about it. It feels almost like a no-name brand, or an OEM edition, which is especially disappointing considering that this is a Sony product.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99
Operating System: Windows
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
grimjack2
|
 - Top 500 |
|
Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
Trusted by: 124 members
About Me:
Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.