Once again our friends from CDRLabs have the world wide exclusive review of a CD-RW drive. This time they have reviewed the Sony CRX1950U. This drive is able to write at 40 speed, rewrite at 12 speed and read back data at 48 speed.
The drive uses the P-CAV write strategy and because it's an external drive it connects to your PC using the USB2.0 interface.
Part of conclusion: |
For a company not known for producing "high performance" CD-RW drives, the CRX1950U performed very well in our tests. Thanks to its P-CAV writing technology, Sony's new drive is one of the fastest external writers currently available. In our tests it was more than 20 seconds faster than Plextor's 40x USB 2.0 writer. By default the CRX1950U reads CD's at 40x but they can be "boosted" to 48x at the touch of the button. With the Turbo Boost enabled, the drive was able to read pressed and CD-R media at 48x and had some pretty good seek times.
For the most part the CRX1950U was able to go head to head with the CRX195A1. However, there were a few areas where Sony's external writer did not do as well as the internal version. The CRX1950U's seek times and CPU usage were higher than the CRX195A1's throughout most of our tests but this is most likely due to the CRX1950U's USB 2.0 interface. The drive also had some problems in our DAE tests. While it was able to reach 48x in some of our DAE tests, it had a tendency to slow down in others. The CRX195A1 did not have these problems so it makes me think that this might be an issue with the drive's USB implementation.
Another great review of CDRLabs, read the entire review here.
Source: CDRlabs.com
