Product Reviews

DVD-RAM is now one of the build-to-order options with Power Mac G4s, so it's not surprising that it's considered mainstream in the Mac world. There are several drives available for SCSI-equipped Macs, but for FireWire users, the choices are more limited. The latest FireWire DVD-RAM drive to hit the shelves is the Que! Fire DVD-RAM.

The first thing you're likely to notice about the drive is its sleek case design. In a tasteful shade of translucent graphite that matches the Power Mac G4, the Que! drive certainly looks better than the average box. A nice touch is that the drive comes with its own shoulder bag, capable of carrying the drive and all its accessories. This makes it very convenient if you want to share the device between home and work machines.

DVD-RAM discs come in a protective sleeve, and are double-sided. This means that although the total capacity of the disc is 5.2Gb, this is divided between the two sides - which means you have to flip the disc over to get to the next 2.6Gb. Obviously, this means that DVD-RAM is useless if you want to store files over 2.6Gb in size, but realistically that's only going to concern a small minority of people.

Installation of the Que! Fire is also very simple, as you might expect from a FireWire device. All you need to do is plug in the drive, drag a simple extension to your Mac's System Folder, then restart. Insert a DVD-RAM disc, and it appears on your desktop, where it's treated like a normal hard disk. Just drag-and-drop files to and from it, and that's all there is to it.

However, FireWire itself is still in the early stages of development and deployment, as we found when testing the Que! Fire. We tried the drive with four machines - a Power Mac G4, a blue-and-white G3, an iMac DV and an old Power Mac 7600 with Orange Micro FireWire card - and got mixed results.

ADVERTISEMENT

Both the iMac and 7600 worked perfectly first time. However, both the G4 and G3 suffered from freezes after installing the Que! Fire, which proved to be caused by conflicts with old extensions. As the manual correctly advises, you need to make sure you're using the newest version of Apple's FireWire software (version 2.2 or newer) if you want to avoid problems.

One thing worth noting is that DVD-RAM isn't a fast way of copying large files. We found that the Que! Fire took just over 30 minutes to copy a 512Mb file, which translates to a data-transfer rate of only 280K/sec. By comparison, an 8x CD-R burner will copy the same amount of data in about 10 minutes, although you'll have to run Toast to do it.

Of course, DVD-RAM has the advantage of appearing on the Mac desktop as a conventional removable drive, rather than requiring any third-party software to write to and read from. Thanks to the threaded Finder copies in Mac OS 8 and beyond, this means you can do something else while files are copying to the DVD-RAM - at least in theory. In practice, however, copying to DVD-RAM is so slow that your Mac is effectively locked up while you're transferring files.

The decision of whether to buy a CD-RW or DVD-RAM drive isn't a clear-cut one. Clearly, DVD-RAM offers the advantage of more storage, of course - either 2.6Gb or 5.2Gb - which means they're much cheaper per-megabyte than CD-RW (5.2Gb DVD-RAM discs costs around £30, compared with about £7 per 640Mb CD-RW). However, CD-RW drives have the advantage of being capable of writing ordinary CD-Rs - which means it can write in a format that virtually any computer can read. By comparison, many DVD drives can't handle DVD-RAM discs. To use a DVD-RAM disc in a DVD drive, you also need to remove the sleeve. Although this works for 2Gb discs, it's not a process that inspires confidence in the media.

Crucially, DVD-RAM drives are much more expensive than CD-RW. The Que! Fire itself is good enough value compared with other DVD-RAM drives, but when you consider that you can get a CD-RW drive for around £300 - half the price of the Que! - then it starts to look expensive.

But if you want a DVD-RAM drive, the Que! Fire is a well-made, nicely designed example of the breed. It's slightly more expensive than the equivalent SCSI models, but if you want to avoid the clutter of SCSI cables around your Power Mac G4 or FireWire-equipped iMac, it's an excellent choice.