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| Sony Spressa CDRW Boxshot |
Installation
Installation was a nominal experience and is nothing more than an unscrewing of the computer case, installing the drive into an empty 5.25 slot and then simply connecting to the IDE channel of your IDE controller. If you want to use the Spressa CD-RW drive to listen to audio CDs as well, you will also have to connect the supplied 4 pin audio cable to your sound card. But since most people use a CD-RW drive as a second CD-ROM all together, you most likely wont need this, as the original CD-ROM will be your audio player. We installed our Spressa drive onto the secondary channel of our Abit KA7 motherboard with it being the only device on the channel for maximum throughout to our Promise RAID 0 drive system also installed in our test bed.
The CRX145E requires a Pentium® 233Mhz PC computer with 32Mb RAM, and a hard disk drive with sub-12ms access time and sustained transfer rate of at least 2.0 MB per second. So make sure you meet those requirements before even considering a CD-RW drive this fast otherwise your just wasting your money because a lower-end system will not be able to keep up with the fast write speeds.
Bundled Software
The included software for the Spressa was a complete CD burning suite. Heres a full list of the bundled software youll get with the Spressa drive
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(actually a few other companies do the same, such as LaCie, and a few others that I can't quite recall right now).
I think Direct-DC bundled with HP does.
However -
The HP drive is revision BA manufactured Febuary 2000
The Sony Spress is revision BB manufactured May 2000
The faceplates are obviously different -as you can see from the pictures submitted, so the HP drive is clearly a remarked Sony. But the real issue here, as stated in the review -was software offered with each drives and how it can help improve reliablity and speed, plus the price of each CD-RW drive package.
Hope that clears up any questions - Rich
If there is no point in comparing the products, then there is no point in marketing the two as separate products. I think it important that the author found differences in performance, because that ultimately means that the firmware revisions did make a difference. The only question, is whether the drives will stay like that (ie their relative firmware dates).
I didn't handle getting the products for this one, but I think the point is that we're doing a 3-4 product 12X CD-RW roundup sometime in the next month, so this one was more of a mini shootout.
I think hardware reviews should always indicate when an item is really just a rebadged product. Ever since my own HP/Sony experience, I stay away from rebadged hardware with extreme prejudice.
Weird. PCWorld and other magazines also reviewed 10X drives even while 12X are out. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that people can't always afford the best and newest toys? hmmm.
On the other hand. I hope the guys here review those 12X drives soon. 10X is not exactly cutting edge.
Go ahead and review the software and call it a software review - not a drive review.
Who uses the bundled software anyway? Most people buy OEM drives and use different software.