Content area
Full Text
No sooner does one CD-Rewritable technology become available than another comes along. This month we put two drives through their paces. One of them--the Yamaha LightSpeed CRW2200EZ--raises the bar for recording performance, and debuts at number two on our chart. The second--Sony's Double Density CD-RW CRX200E--nearly doubles CD storage capacity to 1.3GB per disc.
When it comes to speed, the progress these days is in CD-R write speeds (CD-RW write speeds have held stable since last summer's introduction of 10X). The $235 Yamaha LightSpeed CRW2200EZ is the first drive to enter the next-generation speed zone for CD-R writing. It has vendor-rated write speeds of 20X for CD-R and 10X for CD-RW, along with a 40X speed for reading CD-ROMs.
Yamaha employs Partial CAV technology, where the drive gradually builds up to maximum writing speed. With Partial CAV, the drive maintains a constant angular velocity (turns per second, or spin rate) while the drive writes the inner portion of the disc. Since the drive writes the innermost circles of data first, the writing speed increases as the drive writes bigger circles of data.
Once the top writing speed is reached, the drive switches to constant linear velocity, which slows the spin rate with each larger circle of data to keep the writing speed constant. Competitors' CD- RW drives use Zone CLV to reach a CD-R write speed of 24X. These drives divide the disc into inner, middle, and outer zones and write data at a constant speed--16X, 20X, and 24X, respectively--within each zone.
The Yamaha drive's performance showed gains over our current Best Buy, TDK's 16/10/40 VeloCD ReWriter, and left its 16X/10X/40X sibling, the CRW2100EZ, in the dust. The 20X drive took just 4 minutes, 41 seconds to write our 650MB image file to CD-R--35 seconds less than the TDK. It also excelled at writing CD-R on the fly, taking 4 minutes, 49 seconds to write a 650MB folder of files. An excellent software bundle nicely rounds out this drive's attributes. If you want the fastest performance today, this is the drive for you. But keep in mind that even faster drives capable of writing CD-R at 24X are waiting in the wings.
While the Yamaha drive chipped away at performance records, Sony's $220 Double...