Iomega CD-RW 

This is an internal IDE CD-RW drive rated at 48X write, 24X rewrite and 48X read speed. It has a 2 MB buffer and Smart-Burn buffer under-run protection. It came to us with Nero Burning ROM 5.5 and InCD Packet writing software. 

The test we used for testing the drive was a PIII 700 MHz machine with 128MB RAM on an Intel 815 motherboard. The OS used was Win 98SE. We conducted our tests on 32x media because of poor availability of 48x medium in the market.

We first burned 650 MB data on the medium with the burn speed settings set to 48x, and it took 2 min 55 sec for the same. Interestingly, though we used a slower medium (32x), the burning log did not show any speed reduction of the drive. This is the fastest we got compared to other CD-writers we’ve reviewed recently. While copying the same amount of data in the CD-to-CD copy mode, the drive took 2 min 45 sec, again the fastest. 

In the Audio CD burning test, where we used 73 min of audio as WAV files (16 tracks), the drive took 3 min 12 sec. In our CD-RW tests, the drive took 13 min to format a CD-RW disc. For data transfer speed, the average was around 1.6 MB/sec.

The bottom line: At Rs 6,500, it’s a good buy in its class. The only caveat is the unavailability of supported medium due to which you can’t really use it to its full potential. 

Sanjay Majumder at PCQ Labs