Panasonic CW-7502-B

This
is a CD-Writer only, and so wasn’t included in the rankings. It’s an
entry-level drive with 4x write and 6x read speeds, and a SCSI connection.
The read speed is quite low, compared to what’s available in the market.
It took 20 minutes for directly writing 652.3 MB of data to a CD. Creating
and writing an ISO image took around 34 minutes, which is quite slow. In the
case of audio files, it took 48 minutes to copy 15 tracks to a CD.
Interestingly, this drive requires another SCSI CD drive as the source for
burning an audio CD, else you have to use it in Swap mode. In this, it first
reads a track from the audio CD, then prompts you to insert the CD to write
to, and then writes onto the CD. This process has to be repeated for all the
audio tracks–which makes it extremely time-consuming. However, at a price
of Rs 7,500, this is a good entry-level drive for home users.

The drive took only about 11
minutes for creating an image and writing it to a CD. This was the best
performance of the lot. In packet writing tests, it took 36 minutes to
format a CD-RW disk and gave a 532 MB usable capacity. The data transfer
rates were, however, a bit low at 0.453 MB/sec compared to the others in
this category.

As for copying audio CD tracks, the time
taken was about 18 minutes for 15 tracks. Being a high-end drive, it’s
priced at Rs 24, 950, which is a bit high, even though its performance as a
data storage device is excellent.

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.