Our friends from CDRlabs have wrapped up another review. This time they have taken a look at a CenDyne USB2.0 writer. The drive has a Exaclink buffer underrun protection and a 2 MB buffer. CenDyne has used many Lite-On models in the past, but this buffer underrun protection reveals that this time another brand is used (Lite-On uses SMART-BURN). Also the performance shows clearly that it's not a Lite-On drive.
Part of conclusion: |
Most of the CenDyne CD-RW's we have tested have been based on Lite-On designs. Unfortunately, the external writer they sent us for this review was based on the CW4802 from Optorite. Instead of CAV or P-CAV technology, the Optorite uses Z-CLV to reach its maximum writing speed. This put CenDyne's new external drive at a disadvantage right from the start in our writing tests. I probably could have overlooked this fact if the media compatibility and writing quality would have been above average, but that wasn't the case. Hopefully CenDyne or Optorite can fix some of the problems we had in a future firmware update.
CenDyne's external writer does have its good points too. While the drive's seek times were a little higher than average, it did pretty well in CD read tests. The CenDyne came very close to reaching its rated speeds with pressed and CD-R media and was able to read CD-RW discs at 38x. My biggest surprise was the drive's rewriting performance. While the box said that CenDyne's new USB 2.0 writer was supposed to rewrite at only 12x, the CW4802 based drive came through with 16x rewriting speeds. This gave CenDyne's 48x writer the advantage in our rewriting tests.
But if it's still worth to buy ? Head over to CDRLabs for the rest of the review and find out!
Source: CDRlabs.com
