  
|
 |
|
|
| PCRW804 CD-RW (internal) |
| Philips |
|
Price:
$99.99 |
| Coolness
score: 9 |
| Ease
of use: 9 |
|
| This CD burner flies. It was a nice change of pace from my run of the mill CD burner. It was easy to install and just flat out performed. It came with Adaptec Easy CD creator, which I am very familiar with and it is quite easy to use with or without the CD creator wizard. It took approximatley 13 minutes from testing to completion to burn a full CD’s worth of music. I also love the price, $99.99. It is worth every penny, considering what you could spend. If anyone has any extra cash and needs a gift idea for me, put this CD burner at the top of the list. |
| Impulse CD-RW Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Burner (external) |
| IOGEAR |
|
Price:
$299.95 |
| Coolness
score: 7 |
| Ease
of use: 8 |
|
If you love speed this burner is for you. Going from a dependable (4x) CD-RW to the Ferrari of CD-RW has been a treat. Burning CDs is fun, but once the novelty has worn off and I want to burn a copy of Jimi Hendrix greatest hits before the 11 o’clock news, this is the CD Burner to have. The two drawbacks to this burner are purely aesthetic: it is external and it is huge. I prefer internal because my work area is just plain cluttered enough and if there is a peripheral I can tuck neatly inside my computer then that is the way I’d go.
One other added bonus is the Nero CD Burning software. I was skeptical at first because I am an Adaptec junkie, but this software rivals any CD burning software I’ve used.
|
| WD1000 100-gigabyte EIDE hard drive |
| Western Digital |
|
Price:
$225 |
| Coolness
score: 8 |
| Ease
of use: 7 |
|
| The Western Digital WD1000 drive breaks new ground in space, speed, and price. It’s big enough that we wound up copying everything in our shop to it three times to fill the drive. The installation can be a bit hairy if your computer or operating system have trouble with a IDE drive this big and many computers do have problems here. It took a few tries to get the data transferred from our old drive to the new, but when it was done, it was well worth the minor hassles. We cried when it was time to send this drive back to Western Digital. |
| Lacie PocketCD-RW |
| LaCie Limited |
|
Price:
$400 |
| Coolness
score: 9 |
| Ease
of use: 8 |
|
|
This
drive resembles something you would see in a laptop, thin
and lightweight making it extremely portable. Easy was the
word when it came to installation of this drive, often requiring
only a single cable and software(included) to fully install.
Beneficial
to those on the move, requiring lots of storage or who wish
to have CD burning capabilities on both platforms without
buying separate CD-RW drives.
|
| Sony Digital Relay CRX10U/A2 external drive |
| Sony |
|
Price:
$250 |
| Coolness
score: 6 |
| Ease
of use: 8 |
|
| An external CD-RW drive that also acts as a CD player/MP3 file player. It was very easy to set up, but I was unimpressed by the CD creation software, and during one CD recording session the lid popped up and ruined the CD. Still, if you need to have an external CD writer while on the road, the portable drive works pretty well. |
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