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All-in-one drives that read from and write to CD media and can read DVD-ROMs and play DVD movies are certainly appealing, especially if you're running short of drive bays or IDE connectors. But first-generation combination CD-RW/DVD-ROM drives were expensive and slow. Ricoh's new MediaMaster MP9120A, however, couples record-setting 12X/10X/32X CD-Recordable/CD-Rewritable speed with 8X DVD-ROM performance in one device.

Debuting at number two this month, this $349 CD-RW drive costs little more than what you'd pay for a 12X/10X/32X CD-RW drive and a separate high-quality 8X DVD-ROM drive, and it takes up only one drive bay. Plus, the drive features Ricoh's new JustLink technology. As does Sanyo Electric's Burn-Proof technology (found in our repeat Best Buy, the Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32A), JustLink promises to solve the problem of CD-R discs being ruined by buffer underruns. With the protection offered by such technology, you should be able to get away with doing other things while burning a disc--such as checking your e-mail--without worrying that the disc will be destroyed by an interruption in data flow before it has been completely written.

The other two new Top 5 contenders this month, TDK's $299 veloCD 12/10/32 and Sony's $299 Spressa Professional CRX160E-A1, promise 12X/10X/32X performance. However, both failed to deliver in least one area.

The TDK wrote to CD-R as advertised at 12X, but it wrote to and read CD-RW at speeds more in line with an 8X/8X drive. The prime suspect was the drive's bundled Ahead InCD packet-writing software. When we switched to Prassi's abCD, the drive turned in times commensurate with other 10X CD-RW drives. According to TDK, the issue is not hardware related; Ahead is looking into the software performance discrepancy.

The Sony drive's problem was more serious. Sony lists a 400-MHz Pentium II CPU as a minimum system requirement, and it's not kidding. Our 400-MHz Celeron test bed was unable to write CD-R on the fly until we enabled the CD Extreme mastering software's "cache all files" option. For on-the-fly jobs, the Sony's 8X time of 7 minutes, 13 seconds was actually faster than its 12X time of 8 minutes and 9 seconds. The drive burned at 12X, however the 3 minutes, 46 seconds the software took to assemble and cache all the files sandbagged it. When we installed the drive in a 650-MHz Athlon system, the on-the-fly 12X time dropped to a more than respectable 5 minutes and 1 second.

The PlexWriter 12/10/32A holds fast to the number one spot, while its slower but less expensive sibling, the PlexWriter 8/4/32A, stays on the chart at number four. Other drives offer much better speed these days but typically at higher prices than the reasonable $185 the PlexWriter 8/4/32A sells for. An exception, in CD-RW speed at least, is the $179 Pacific Digital 8824ei, an 8X/8X/24X drive that's a bargain for those who are willing to compromise on CD-ROM read speed. As a result of its low price point--and some adjustments that we made to our chart calculations this month to reflect the market--this model takes the number three spot.

Call Back in the Morning

Sony drives dropped in the rankings this month due to the company's new, less generous technical support policies. The company's former round-the-clock support has been replaced by 12-hour-a-day, Monday-through-Saturday service. The new policy is still better than many, but without the extra credit earned by the endless support hours, the CRX140E/CH2 slipped to the number five spot.

Even Faster Drives on the Horizon

Earlier this month, Yamaha announced the first CD-RW drive to break the 12X CD-R barrier. The CRW2100 series of 16X/10X/40X drives will be available in three interfaces: IDE, SCSI, and IEEE 1394. Utilizing an 8MB buffer and Yamaha's new Waste-Proof buffer underrun compensation technology, the drives promise excellent performance. The CRW2100 series will use a combination of the more conventional Constant Linear Velocity writing technique with Constant Angular Velocity to write to CD-Rs at up to 16X. With CLV, the speed of the drive varies to keep the disc moving at a constant speed relative to the head. In other words, to write at a constant 12X speed the drive spins faster when the head is writing the inner tracks than it does when it is writing the outer tracks. When the drive switches over to CAV, the disc starts spinning at a constant rate, and the head can write data even more quickly on the perimeter of the disc than it could on the inner tracks. We'll see if this Yamaha unit lives up to its billing once we receive a shipping unit.

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