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Follow Us| HP CD-Writer Plus 8210e |
| USB drive. Rs 20,052 Speeds: 4x/4x/6x Software for CD-R: EasyCD Creator 3.5 Software for CD-RW: DirectCD Cache: 2 MB Vendor: Hewlett-Packard India, Chandiwala Estate, Maa Anandmai Marg, Kalkaji, New Delhi 110019. Tel: 11-6826000 Fax 6826030 E-mail: bibhor_bansal@hp.com |
The main highlight of this
drive is its portability. It’s an external drive with a USB connector that
can be moved around from one machine to another. It has 4x write, 4x
rewrite, and 6x read speed. Being USB, it’s plug-n-play, and takes just a
few minutes to install.
It has 2 MB buffer on-board,
which is sufficient for the write speeds it offers. Its write speeds are a
little slow for 4x writes, taking 21 minutes to write 652.3 MB of data. It
took about 24 minutes to create an ISO image of 652.3 MB of data and burn it
onto a CD. The drive didn’t take long to create an image (four minutes),
but the writing took a whopping 20 minutes.
For
rewrite tests, it took 37 minutes to format a CD-RW disk and gave a capacity
of 533 MB. The average throughput observed was 0.476 MB/sec, which is good
and comparable to others in the category.
When it came to copying audio
CD tracks, the 2 MB buffer showed its limitation. It took about 20 minutes
to copy around 60 minutes of audio.
Like the HP 9310i, it also
comes with Neato and Acid Music. It also has Broderbund’s PrintShop
Multimedia Organizer to manage your photographs and photo albums in style.
At a price of Rs 20,052, this is a bit costly
as far as performance is concerned. However, its portability and ease of
install make it an attractive buy.