December 1998

Three Award-Winning Drives

By Melchor Quagliata

We tested three diverse drives in a quest to find reliable disc duplication, packet recording, speed and errorless performance. All three delivered reliable recording and excellent performance at rated speeds. Installation was easy, and the drives included comprehensive software bundles.

The Smart and Friendly (Chatsworth, CA 818-772-8001 www.smartand friendly.com) CD-RW 426 Deluxe External is a SCSI CD-Rewritable drive. This CD-RW drive has a 6x read/4x write/2x rewrite speed. It includes DirectCD software from Adaptec (Milpitas, CA 408-945-8600) that lets users transfer data from a CD-RW or CD-R disc as effortlessly as one would with a floppy disk. Also included is the deluxe version of Easy CD Creator, CD Copier Deluxe and MediaAgent for sharing the drive over a LAN.

If ease of installation and low price are your major concerns, check out a Compro drive ($350) from ACS Innovations (Santa Clara, CA 408-566-0900). The Compro is a 4x write/8x read IDE CD-R drive. This unit's 4x write speed makes it one of the higher speed IDE recorders on the market today. The Compro includes both Easy CD Creator and DirectCD, which let you drag and drop files seamlessly within an OS. Installation is simple.

Looking for a rewritable drive that's mobile and can easily be installed anywhere? Try the Backpack CD-rewriter ($500) from MicroSolutions (DeKalb, IL 815-756-3411 WEB). The Backpack drive is a 2x write/6X read/2x rewrite drive that can attach to a PC through a standard printer port. The backpack drive includes both DirectCD and Easy CD Creator software. The drive installs easily on a laptop or PC. You can plug your printer directly into a port on the back of the Backpack drive. U