AOpen CD-ReWriter

This CD-rewriter supports JustLink technology to prevent buffer under-run errors, and comes with Nero 5 CD-burning software, InCD software for writing to RW disks, Gamut 2000 software MP3 player, a CD-R and RW media.

We tested the drive on an Asus CUPLE-VM board with Celeron/600 processor, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, and a Samsung 52x CD-drive. A simple CD write at 12x took a zippy 6 min and 47 sec for 652.6 MB of files. It took 2 min 9 sec to create an ISO image on the hard disk and 6 min 48 Sec to burn it on the CD-R disk. It took about 14 min to burn 15 tracks of 59.5 min of an audio CD, which was 2.5 min longer than the ASUS drive we’d reviewed last month. The drive’s rewriting capabilities are pretty good. It took 8 min 49 sec to do physical formatting and 5 min 55 sec for logical formatting. The latter type of formatting registers all defective sectors. Data transfer rates were also pretty good, as it took 1 min and 18 sec to copy a single 102 MB compressed file to the CD-RW disk. We were also able to use the drive’s maximum formatted capacity without any problem. We even ran multiple applications while burning CDs with the drive. Overall, the drive works pretty well and is a good buy considering the performance.

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs