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LG Electronics GCE-8400B CD-RW Drive
Almost everyone I know has a CD burner. Virtually all new computers
come with one, and if you need to buy one yourself, store shelves
are full of them, most of them reasonably priced. It used to be
that you'd only think of HP or Sony when you thought of CD burners.
But now LG Electronics
is the leader in this industry. I recently obtained the LG
GCE-8400B 40x 12x 40x CD-RW drive to review.
The specs of the drive are as follows:
- Internal CD-RW Storage Drive: 40x Speed
- Access Time: 110ms
- Interface Type: E-IDE/ATAPI
- Buffer Size: 2MB
- "SuperLink" Buffer Under Run Prevention Technology
- Data Transfer Rate: Sustained - MAX 6000KB/s, Burst - PIO
Mode4: 16.67 MB/s, DMA Mode2 - 16.67 MB/s
Installation
If you are comfortable opening your computer case and fiddling
a bit, or if you've already added or changed an IDE device, then
you'll be able to install this. The drive comes with screws, an
IDE cable, and a sound cable. The accompanying Owner's Manual
clearing walks you through how to install the drive. Once the
drive was installed, my Windows 2000 Professional test system
recognized the drive and was ready to use it.
The drive comes with Roxio Easy CD Creator and Roxio Direct CD.
These also installed without incident.
Note: During the testing of this drive I also played around with
Windows XP briefly. I installed XP for other reasons, but I did
notice that Windows XP recognized the drive as a CD-RW drive and
was able to write to it without any other software.
Testing
How do you test a CD burner? You burn CDs! Here are some of the
results from my testing (I did much more burning than this, but
just wanted to share some examples):
- I had a directory on my drive of files that I wanted backed
up, so I started my personal copy of Nero Burning ROM and started
it burn. I burned 260 MB of data in 2 minutes.
- I burned 650 MB / 5 large files worth of data using Nero in
3 minutes 40 seconds.
- I used the Roxio Direct CD software that I had installed and
burned the same 650 MB / 5 large files of data in 15 minutes.
- I burned 27,000 files / 570 MB of data using Nero in 12 minutes
When you are burning a CD you must remember that the number of
files, the size of the files, the speed of the drive you are copying
from, the amount of system memory, the software you are using
and the activity that is happening on your system when you are
burning all play a role in how fast it actually takes to burn
a CD. In the tests above, you see that in Sample 2 a large amount
of data was copied in a short amount of time using Nero (multi-session
burning). In Sample 3, the same data was copied using Direct CD
(packet writing), but took significantly longer. This is a result
of the different way that data is read and written to the CD using
these two methods. It has nothing to do with the software manufacturer.
Visit http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq.html
to view the CD-Recordable FAQ. You can find out about Nero Burning
ROM by visiting http://www.nero.com/en/content/helptool/index.htm
and you can find out about Easy CD Creator by visiting http://support.roxio.com/roxio_support/ecdc/ecdc_index.jhtml.
Burning 27,000 files to a CD is an extreme example. Most of the
testing had a more reasonable number of files. The burning times
consistently came up in the 3-4 minute range.
A couple of times I tried to do as much on my system as I could
while the CD was burning. I noticed that the buffer protection
dropped all the way to 0% at one point but the disk did not fail.
The large 2 MB buffer on the drive and the "SuperLink"
buffer technology certainly stopped me from wasting any CDs.
Purchase
You can purchase the LG
GCE-8400B 40x 12x 40x CD-RW drive for $58.99
US (or $95 CDN).
Conclusions
I used to think that if it took 20 minutes it was no big deal.
If I wanted to burn something, I'd start it, go grab a snack,
and come back. But why wait when you can burn an entire CD in
just a couple of minutes. Want a new CD for the car, but have
to leave for work right away? You can probably wait the 3 minutes.
Having a meeting and someone wants a copy of your data? Excuse
yourself to go and burn it and you'll be back in 3 minutes. Yes,
I'm converted!
The bottom line is this... if you are looking for an inexpensive
burner that is very fast and very reliable, then pick yourself
up a LG Electronics GCE-8400B CD-RW Drive.
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