Mitsumi sent us a press release that announces that they have the first drive that officially supports the Mount Rainier (Drag and Drop to CD-RW support in OS) standard and are approved by Microsoft.
With clearly some competitive notes they today released that the Mitsumi CR 480A TE is the only CD-RW drive, which passed the Mount Rainier Test Suite.
Test Results |
Microsoft conducted the first test series (1st Plugfest) with drives from different manufacturers in January 2002. The participants included MITSUMI, Yamaha, Teac and Plextor. The drives were subjected to the Mount Rainier Test Suite, which was developed by the Mount Rainier Group. This tested all important MRW functions: obligatory commands, formatting units, GAA addressing and early eject. The drives were additionally subjected to long and complicated strains. All drives failed in at least two points, with the exception of MITSUMI's CR 480A TE.
EASYwrite
'žEASYwrite' is the Mount Rainier Group's seal of approval. Its logo will distin-guish all drives, which have passed the Mount Rainier Test Suite, and are 100 percent Mount Rainier compliant as a result. The MITSUMI CR 480A TE is the first and the only CD-RW drive, which is authorised to carry this logo.
We have the MITSUMI CR 480A TE ready for testing and also have received the software update from Mitsumi. Stick around and see our first testing results. For those who like to some information about Mount Rainier, read below (from the press release):
Using Mount Rainier conform software (e.g. Nero's InCD 3.X or Write-CD-RW! Pro V 3.0 by SAI) enables files to be written on CD-RW media and deleted again, as easily as on floppy disks. All functionalities are available for PC-compatible systems under Windows, Apple and Macintosh. A brand new, unformatted CD-RW can already be used for writing after one minute, even though the format-ting process is underway in the background. Even retrieving the CD before for-matting has been completed does not pose to be a problem, as the process is simply continued after the CD has been replaced. The limited block-size of 2Kbytes enables efficient storage, even when numerous small files are to be stored. |
Mount Rainier also posses a function to administrate defective memory blocks. Should a CD-RW sector prove to be defective, due to fingerprints or scratches, this sector is skipped and another vacant sector is used. The 480A TE will probably be available in a bundle with a Mount Rainier compatible version of
Nero's InCD from mid May. This bundle will make an additional purchase of software unnecessary. There will be the possibility of a free of charge update for drives already purchased. The implementation of the CD-MRW standard in Win-dows
XP is planned for this year.
Well Mount Rainier should make writing to CD-RW's more user friendly, less complicated and more stable. Let us hope it does what it promises !
Source: Mitsumi
