by 4zkxa on Tue Jun 03, 2003 6:04 pm
I recently bought a BTC 52x24x52 (made in China by Top Glory Electronics) rebagged under Micro Advantage brand. I used it to read and write intensively, about 14/24 for about a week. I think it's an average drive. Here is more details if you want to know:
1. Casing: The case looks very nice. The buttons are solid to the touch. The tray open quitely, there is some padding to prevent air.
2. Read: I used the drive to play a game (constant reading). For about the first two hours of playing, the game runs quitely, from then on, the drive got really loud, and seems to have trouble reading the disk, I think it got overheat or something. Audio can only be read at about 30x, VCD is 8x.
3. Write CD-R: The speed seems really slow. I used a 48x media, burn about 700 MB of data at 48x and it tooks about 7-10 minutes. Burning audio takes even longer, about 11-15 minutes.
4. Write CD-RW: Mount Rainer and Packet Writing works fine. Sometimes burning with low speed media (1x-4x) produces write errors.
5. Buffer Underrun Protection: The drives uses SuperLink, which doesn't seem to work very well. I used Nero to burn about 700 MB of data, ran 3 cpu and disk intensive programs (mpeg encoder, asf splitter, and defrag), and also copy a 300 MB file from one hard drive to another. After the Nero buffer (which I limited to 1 MB) ran out, the drive buffer survives on its own for about 20 seconds (jumping between 20% and 100%), then I got a write error.
Overall, if you don't need buffer underrun protection, satisfy with slow speed, and can handle a coaster sometimes, then this drive is for you, otherwise, try some other brands (except benq and accesstek I think, they suck).
It seems all cdrw drives are made in China now, does anyone knows any brand beside the expensive Yamaha that isn't made in China?