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Burners. What would we do without them? Well, have a lot more desk space for a start. Hands up those of you who with burners that have towering multiple stacks of burnt CD's, most of which you will never even look at again and yet are reluctant to throw out because you might need the data, or that bit of free space that's left on them again one day? This is the main reason why I sought a rewritable drive to replace my ageing Panasonic 20/8x. I had been holding off for the Sony 32/12/10x SCSI drive but now that it's finally released I've discovered that it's way over my budget. Also way over my budget are the Plextor 32/12/10x or any other drive with Burnproof. Ever since my first burner in mid 1997, which was an Wearnes 2x RW IDE job, I've had something against IDE burners. The Wearnes was very unreliable, and moderate to heavy multitasking was a recipe for coaster city almost everytime. I'm not sure how much of that was the drive's fault itself and how much was the (then) slow IDE bus or even Windows 95, but since it was only burning at 300k/s I still hold the drive to blame. Lately though many of you in the forums have said that today's IDE burners are a far cry from the early ones, and this is what convinced me to take a shot with another IDE burner, after living with purely SCSI burners for the last 3 years.

The first thing you notice about this drive is the price. It is currently under $400, which is a good $200-$250 less than a Plextor drive of the same speed. At the time I bought it, it was over $300 cheaper than the Plextor, but price drops to the Plextor have seen the gap reduce. Why is it so much cheaper than the Plextor? The main reason is it has no Burnproof. If you are unaware, Burnproof prevents buffer underruns by switching the laser off if the buffer empties, and resuming where it left off once the buffer fills again. Of course this isn't going to save your CD from a total system crash but it will enable you to thrash your hard drives or use your CPU considerably more without affecting the CD. I believe the Aopen 1232CRW is a re-badged Ricoh, and if that's the case you can apply any of my findings to the Ricoh version as well.

I decided that I didn't need to spend $300 extra on a Burnproof drive. With 12x burning, which translates to roughly 6 minutes to create a CD, and no Burnproof, I could afford to leave my system alone for that short amount of time if necessary in order to complete a CD. I decided though that I would acid test the drive for realibility during multitasking to see if Burnproof would have been a worthwhile option.

The drive:
As the model number suggests, it is a 32x read and 12x write CDRW burner. Not suggested by the model number (but included in the title on the box) is the 10x speed rewrite function, which is a quantum leap from the older RW drives, which all seem capable of only 4x RW no matter how fast the CDR burning component is. The RW burning speed was probably held back by the discs themselves which could only handle up to 4x burning. But there is now available a new generation of RW CD's which support 4-10x burning (and maybe more) at about double the cost of a normal RW disc ($5 as opposed to $2.50 or so). Even though at 10x the RW speed is only slightly more than double the older 4x standard, the difference in real time seems a lot more to me. For example, to burn a full CD at 4x I could start the burn and then have a shower and the CD would still be only about halfway through when I got out, while it would have finished in the meantime at 10x.

The drive has an outward-folding flap in front of the tray which juts out a bit and looks a bit ugly, but I've seen uglier drives. The eject button is further from the right edge than most CDROM/burner eject buttons, and this is a slight hassle when reaching around over the top of the open tray to press it. It has an E-IDE/ATAPI interface and a 4Mb buffer, which seems adequate if not a prudent amount. Most 8x burners have only a 2Mb buffer, so doubling it to 4Mb while adding only 50% to write speed gives this drive a bit more leeway than with standard 8x burners. One of the features is "An improved anti-heat design", which probably explains why there is no fan in it. My old Panasonic 8x drive had a little fan in the back to suck out the extra heat, Aopen have probably designed the drive to use less power than some older burners. Not requiring a fan is good because fans are well known for their unreliability, and you don't want a dying fan to cause your burner to fry itself just outside the warranty period.

Standard rear connectors and jumpers.. no fan needed.

Installation:
Installation was fairly painless, as you'd expect. I found it a tad difficult to get the mounting screws, but you get that sometimes with those smal fine-threaded screws. A little care and patience was all that was needed. I hooked everything up, and it auto-detected first time and was ready to burn.

Burning:
I won't bother putting up any specific times for a specific amount of data but suffice to say that it will do a typical full CD in around 6 minutes. A full RW CD's will take a little longer, at about 7 and a half minutes. You're looking at seconds at best when determining the difference in write speed between different brand 12x/10x burners and without some standard set of data to write I don't want to place too much emphasis on how fast it can burn a full CD. Here is a Sandra benchmark of the read function anyway, using a CDRW disc with a copy of the Quake2 PAK0.PAK file (about 183Mb).

I burned an average quality CD (LG silver) at 12x to see if the 8x rated disc would burn ok at this speed. After the burn I put into a Pioneer 16x DVDROM and copyied the entire CD to hard drive and the disc didn't even slow down during the filecopy. A *real* test of the drive here would be to burn one of those old green Samsung CD's, which virtually no burner is capable of burning reliably. If I ever get hold of one I'll see what happens to it at 12x.

I don't know if this drive supports overburning but it does fully support 80 minute CD's so I don't see the need to test overburning.

The real test of the drive's mettle is how it copes with the situations for which Burnproof was created. Since it is a Burnproof-less drive, I expected to get many coasters if I did anything too intensive while burning a CD. As you'll see on the next page, I was pleasantly surprised.