Sony Digital Relay CD External CDRW/MP3 Player Review - PAGE 2

Installation was simple; Just plug the Relay in and insert the driver disk. I didn't even have to reboot. The utilities came bundled on a CD with a cool Shockwave install program. Sony included four programs; CD Extreme, a CD burning utility, abCD, a packet writing program that lets you use your CD-RW disk like a hard drive, Liquid Audio, a CD Playing utility and Retrospect Express, a utility for backing up your hard drive.

I really liked using CDExtreme; it was very easy to use, and close to Sony's claim that you could be "burning CDs in two mouse clicks"; the interface is well thought out and easy to use. One interesting point about CD Extreme is that if you burn regular music CDs, CDExtreme will convert MP3s to Audio CD format on the fly, which is very cool.

Formatting a CD-RW for packet-writing using Sony's enclosed abCD software took 38 minutes. I didn't do any more rigorous tests with the abCD software because it had the tendency to freeze my computer. abCD does not deal well with any kind of CD changing shenanigans, it often froze while trying to shut it off or if you had a program with a file pointer to the Relay and opened the drive. Sometimes it froze apparently at random. After a lot of fooling around I concluded that it was definitely abCD causing the problem and not the application using the drive. I'm hoping that by the time the Relay hits retail, this problem can be solved, because packet-writing is a useful feature and seems particularly suited to the portable burner environment where you could use it like a big external floppy.

Because the Relay is USB it's hot pluggable; you can add and remove the unit seamlessly. One issue that irritated me was that since the Relay doesn't have driver support for NT and because Windows 95 doesn't support it I couldn't use it at work to bring files home.

CD Tach showed performance close to Sony's claimed 6X capability; the Relay scored a 5.5 on regular CD and 4.7 on CD-R, which is about what to be expected considering USB's limited bandwidth. Movie playback off CD was smooth and I never had any problems with it skipping frames or suffering from any slowdowns.

Unfortunately the Digital Relay is cursed by the dreaded "Buffer Underrun"; I couldn't do a direct CD to CD copy at 4x because each time I tried the burner died after about five minutes. Even copying from an image file didn't help matters; in the end I had to resort to burning at 2x. This is particularly strange because I have no problem burning regular data at 4x, you can burn a data CD successfully then immediately after a CD copy from a CD image will fail.

For a good reference on the speed you can expect from a USB CD-ROM, take a look at these CD-Tach results:

Creative, AOpen, and Sony Digital Relay CDTachs

The Creative 52x CD-ROM is on the faster end of IDE CD-ROM performance and as you can see USB drives don’t even get close. The AOpen CRW1232 results are pretty much in between the other two, performance-wise. The verdict? Don’t expect excellent CD-ROM performance out of CD Burners or USB devices because each type of device has its own specific role to play.