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cyan
Superb piece of engineering! Burns really reliably in BeOS R5 and Dano, using Helios (cdrecord-based), and CD manager seems to work with it, too. I've not tried the BeOS built-in burner, since it's not very powerful, but it seems to recognize it.
The 2MB buffer is more than adequate for high burning speeds; even when doing relatively intensive things in BeOS at the same time. No coasters yet! Not even when video editing at the same time. The buffer underrun protection is also top-class; I had it activate once, before I fixed the slow drive problem in BeOS (search the tip server for "FAT slowdown"), and the disk was still fine.
I can happily write to CDs at speeds up to 24x (I have not gone any faster since I have slow media, but there is no reason why it shouldn't work) without coasters; CD-RW writing, blanking and rewriting also works flawlessly. The drive can also detect and adjust the burning speed depending on the speed of your media; this works fine in BeOS, if you set the maximum burning speed; the drive will throttle down if appropriate.
Although you shouldn't use CD writers as your primary CD drive (I had my HP 8110 fail because of this; CD writers aren't designed for heavy seeking), the digital audio extraction on the Liteon is superb. Unlike my LuckyGoldstar 24X CD-ROM drive, where digital audio extraction occasionally clicks and pops, the Liteon is perfect, every time, not to mention extremely fast at extracting audio. It also has a proper digital SPDIF audio output on the back, although I have not tested this.
The quality of the drive, despite its low price, appears to be very sound; apart from the slightly noisy and a bit cheap-feeling CD tray, the drive performs very well, without any rattles or noise even when spinning at high RPMs. The drive's appearance also appears quite professional with the tray closed, which is always a plus.
Another plus is that the drive doesn't have a stupid fan on it. Fans are quickly becoming the new fashion accessories for PCs, even for pathetic things like chipsets and cd writers; a practice which should stop! They're noisy, unreliable, dust and fire-risk creating, and generally unpleasant, not to mention totally unnecessary! And no, the lack of a fan will not cause the drive to fail early. The semis can handle 80C happily; the drive runs much cooler than that since it only consumes 10-15 watts when spinning. Plus, the drive can do without 2 centimeters of solidified dust in its optics. ;)
However, I had better mention that the first drive I bought (from a local shop) was actually defective from day 1 -- it would read just fine, but it simply would not write, even under windows -- it failed the OPC. I suspected the burning laser or associated drive electronics were at fault. I returned the drive and the replacement has been flawless ever since. The problem may have been down to the fact that the drives were piled up in the computer store, looking like they had been knocked over and otherwise mistreated in transit.
In conclusion, if you're looking for a CD writer for BeOS, this is the one to go for. It's extremely cost effective, extremely fast (a few minutes for a CD), built well and functions flawlessly. rating: 10 |
