Sony’s CD-RW Drive 

The Sony CRX185A1 is an internal ATAPI/EIDE drive that works on Win 98SE/Me/2000 Pro/XP. It gives 32x write, 10x rewrite, and 40x read speeds, and supports a variety of formats including CD-DA, CD-ROM (XA), Video CD, Photo CD (multi-session), CD text and CD extra formats.

We tested the drive on a Win 2000 machine with a PIII/800 and Asus CUSL2M motherboard. For our tests we used Imation’s 32x CD-Rs and Verbatim’s 10x CD-RWs, since we didn’t get any CD-R/RW media with the drive. We compared its performance with an Iomega CD-Writer (also reviewed in this issue). The Iomega has 40x-write speed, but we had to test it with 32x media, since 40x media were not available in the market even when we were going to press. On the performance front, the Sony drive took 4:29 (mins:secs) to burn 650 MB of data from the hard drive, while the Iomega took a few seconds more at 4:35 mins. It also managed to create an audio CD faster than the Iomega drive. However, in the remaining tests, the Iomega drive performed better than the Sony drive. The Sony drive took 4:44 mins to copy 15 tracks of audio from a 52x CD-ROM drive to a CD-R disk as against 3:56 mins taken by the Iomega drive. In CD-RW tests, the drive took longer than the Iomega drive taking 12:57 mins to format a CD-RW. It gave an average throughput of 1.2 MB/Sec. 

The drive ships with B’s Recorder Gold for CD-Rs and B’s clip packet-writing software for CD-RWs. It’s priced at Rs 12,000 and comes with a one-year warranty. 

The Bottom Line. Considering its price of Rs 12,000 and performance, the Iomega drive is a better bet at Rs 7,500.

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs