OptoRite CW5201 52/32/52 review @ CDRLabs.com

Within the last year or so, we've taken a look at a number of
drives based on OptoRite designs. Most of them from MSI. While some of
these drives impressed us, others just didn't perform as well as we would
have liked. Needless to say, I really didn't know what to expect when I
went into this review. Fortunately, the CW5201 falls into the first
category, rather than the latter. While there were a few areas where drive
could have been better, it delivers a good mix of performance and features
at an affordable price.

The CW5201 also turned in some pretty good times in
our writing tests. While not as media friendly as Lite-On's new 52x
writer, its writing quality was much better than I expected. OptoRite's
new drive was also very fast when rewriting at 32x with programs like
Nero. Unfortunately, I can't say as much for its packet writing
performance. Even with 32x Ultra Speed media, the drive would not packet
write at anything faster than 16x. It was a similar situation when erasing
CD's. Here too the CW5201 seemed to be limited to 16x.

Lastly, you have the CW5201's features. On the buffer
underrun protection front, OptoRite has given their new writer a 2MB
buffer along with support for Sanyo's BURN-Proof technology. While the
buffer was a little smaller than we'd like, this system worked very well
to prevent coasters caused by buffer underruns. The CW5201 also offers
more writing and rewriting speeds than most people will every use along
with technologies like EXACT-Rec and AWSS. Surprisingly, OptoRite's new
writer lacks support for the Mt. Rainier format. Hopefully this is
something they can be enabled in a future firmware
update.