Sony’s Latest CD-Writer

The latest CD-Writer from Sony supports 24x write, 10x rewrite, and 40x read speeds. It supports buffer under-run technology to prevent errors caused by buffer under-runs. The drive ships with a rich-software bundle, which includes B’s recorder Gold, B’s Clip, Retrospect Express, Music Match Jukebox,

PhotoBase, and Video Impression. Unfortunately, the drive didn’t come bundled with any CD-R or RW media, as has been the case with most other drives we’ve reviewed. 

We tested the drive using Nero 5.5 and Adaptec InCD software. As the drive didn’t come with any CD-R or RW media, we used HP’s CD-R and

CD-RW media for our tests. It took 6 min to directly burn 648 MB of data from a hard drive to a CD-R. Unfortunately, this was about 40 secs slower than Samsung’s CD Rewriter we reviewed earlier, which only supported 16x write speed. Next the drive took 1 min 26 sec to create an ISO image, and 5 min 50 sec to burn it on to a CD-R disk. This time it was only a few seconds slower than the Samsung drive. 

We tested the rewriting capabilities using 4x re-writable media. Here, the drive took 20 min to do a physical format and 7 min for logical formatting. To check its read and write speeds, we transferred a 98.8 MB compressed file between the hard drive and

CD-RW media. The drive took 3 min 5 sec to transfer the file from the HDD to CD-RW and 1 min 3 sec to transfer the same file from the

CD-RW to the HDD, which is good enough at 4x speed. Also you’ll get better results if you are using a

CD-RW media that supports 10x rewriting speeds. The bottom line Given the performance of the drive, it’s a bit expensive.

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs