click to enlarge
Benchmarks:
Since Roxio has been shown to have several rather severe problems,
and due to the fact that I also own Ahead Nero it will be the
main program used in the benchmarks. As soon as you start Nero
up you notice something interesting - Nero doesnt seem to take
into account the Firewire caddy surrounding the drive.
It identifies the drive as a CRX160E, a normal EIDE drive, which certainly fits with what we know about the drive, since the 160 is a 12x. So it seems that our CRX1600LEK is infact a CRX160E within an EIDE>Firewire caddy. Nothing really surprising here. When we burn a cd on our little drive Nero correctly identifies it as 12x burn, and burns accordingly.
For those interested, the final burn time was 6:26. Which corresponds with 12x pretty well. From this start we can begin to theorise as to what interface chipset resides within out little black box. At 1,800Kb/s we would presume that the chipset would be either an Ox911 or similar. On the read test side of life, Nero CD Speed test gives us this result.
Which is a pretty decent result for a standard CAV drive, and the 31.70x corresponds nicely to the rated spec of 32x. What is even more interesting is that the 31.70x would give us a throughput of 9,510Kb/s. Which further confirms our hypothesis that we have a very fast, Ox911 or similar, chipset residing within. For those of you who can't be bothered doing the math here is a pic of the real throughput.
Of course the theoretical speed has skied even higher than the real, but one can presume this is due to the CAV technology making the outer edge of the CD faster than the inner.
Conclusions:
Overall this is a very nice drive, packaged quite neatly in a
stylish external casing. While it may not be the fastest drive
on the market, its 12x speed is certainly very acceptable and
one must wonder what you would do with 40x burner anyway. Is an
extra minute really that important? If you're like me you just
walk away anyway. I have had no problems with the Firewire interface
other than the initial flimsy cable (not provided with this drive).
Even when running apps like Adobe Photoshop and copying files
around the HDD, the 4mb buffer barely twitches.
I would give this drive a 4.5/5 and highly recommend it. The only disadvantage is the 12x max speed. The Sony CRX1600LEK is available from SecretNet for about $330.