Overclockers Australia - Sony CRX1600LEK 12x8x32x CD Writer

Sony CRX1600LEK 12x8x32x CD Writer
09-April-2002 - Review by Chris "takai" Porter

'Tis the season to be jolly, 'tis the season to buy far too much hardware. So here we go again. This time with a new toy, a Sony CRX1600LEK 12x8x32x CD burner. Well you may say, 12x burners came out ages ago, so what’s so special about this one. Well, it does come in this funky little grey caddy, and uses some weird thing called i.Link.

What you say. I can’t hear that from the back, oh... what’s i.Link. Well let’s see, sometime about mid-1999 a certain company called Apple decided to patent what was then known as Standard IEEE1394 and rename it Firewire. With that out of the way they settled back on their laurels knowing they had the most kickarse named external interface around, and to tell you the truth, its pretty kickarse. Subsequently Sony decided that it needed to use something which sounded cooler than IEEE1394, a retail mouthful for sure, and patented i.Link as the same technology. So basically same thing different name.

IEEE1394/i.Link/Firewire (subsequently Firewire cos I think it sounds cooler) has a wonderful maximum transfer rate of 400mbit/s and is hot pluggable. While it was originally developed for DV cameras and the like it has since branched out considerably into an interface almost as ubiquitous as USB. The CRX1600LEK builds on this fine tradition.

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As you can see it comes neatly packaged in an external box 10 times as large as the unit itself.

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Oh, isn’t it such a darling little unit. Quite surprisingly it looks extremely nice, and while quite hefty feels extremely solid. As far as I'm concerned the build quality is excellent and I don’t envisage any problems from this drive. The external unit comes shipped with one 6-pin to 6-pin firewire cable, an IEC cable, two CD burning programs (Toast for Mac, and Roxio for Windows), a blank CDR, and two blank CDR-Ws. The external casing is finished in a very succulent dark grey casing similar to the grey on the VAIO series of laptops. While the drive itself is finished in a color which looks somewhat like a powdered black metal paint. Also let me apologise for the terrible photo, but my camera's white balance doesn't seem to want to work today; sorry.

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From the back we can see that the drive has a small slew of connectors, well a very small slew. Like most Firewire devices it has a pair of ports on the back for pass-through to an external device. The drive derives its power from a single IEC socket on the rear of the device. To top things off this drive even has a pair of RCA outs for the audio.

So, as all good reviewers do when they first get a new piece of hardware, I hurriedly extricated it from the box and plugged the unit in; and got absolutely nothing. Rather quickly for the time of night panic set in, and aforesaid reviewer started stressing that he had just killed the drive, or even worse it was DOA. After many searches of Google, Everything2 and several forums without success our intrepid reviewer finally consulted the manual.. which revealed all of nothing, since the manual was the standard fluffy gumby crap which in normally shipped with hardware. Further stressing ensued until by absolute fluke he moved the Graphire2 (see previous review) on his desk, and voila the drive worked.

Life had transpired that the cord which I had borrowed from Fad (who reviewed the Firewire IceCube drive caddy) to plug-in the drive, as my laptop only has a 4-pin port, was faulty, and some of the wires in the 4-pin end were loose and were only making contact at certain angles. Much cursing ensued, that one silly cable had managed to waste an hour of my time.

To my amazement Windows even recognises that the drive is infact an IEEE1394 drive, or aforesaid Firewire.

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To top it all off the drive even works without any drivers whatsoever (in 2k and XP).

One of the main features of this drive is the ability to hot swap it from machine to machine without any hassles, well not many. Windows tends to complain a bit when you do this.

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Although this I do blame on Windows itself not displaying the removal of device icon on the taskbar.

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