Product Reviews

The LaCie USB CD-RW is one of the first devices of its kind in the UK. It's a CD-RW (CD-rewriteable) drive which enables USB-based computers to record CD-R and CD-RW discs (see Que! Drive, p43). This means both the iMac and new Power Mac G3 computers can burn CD-ROMs directly.

At its heart, the drive is a bog-standard LaCie IDE CD-RW device with an IDE-to-USB controller card interface. On Windows-based computers, Adaptec's EasyCD Creator and DirectCD software have enabled USB CD-ROM burning for some time. On the Mac, though, users have been waiting for a USB-enabled version of Adaptec's Mac equivalent CD-RW software: Toast.

Toast moves up to version 3.8 for the purposes of USB, but otherwise there are no other internal changes over Toast's previous version 3.5.6. As a result, recording CD-ROMs on the LaCie USB CD-RW is as easy as it is on any other Mac-based CD-R or CD-RW drive. In its most basic form, you drag-and-drop the files, folders or CDs you want to write or copy directly onto the data area of Toast's window and click on the Write CD button. Missing from Toast 3.8, however, is the extra Toast CD Reader extension which allows a CD-R or CD-RW drive to function as a standard CD-ROM drive and mount media on the desktop. Adaptec claims this will be available shortly, and will be supplied as standard in the next release of the software.

Physically

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connecting and using the LaCie USB CD-RW is as simple as USB always promised things would be. Once Toast has been installed and the Mac has been restarted, it's just a matter of hot-plugging the USB lead between Mac and drive, powering up the drive, and getting on with it. A pair of USB driver system extensions for LaCie's range of USB drives are installed as part of the process, along with Toast.

A potential problem is the LaCie USB CD-RW's slow speed. It's a 2x2x6 device, which allows writing of both CD-R and CD-RW media at a maximum 2x speed. The nature of USB itself limits the speed of CD-ROM recording, with a potential maximum 4x speed for the creation of data CD-ROMs directly from a disc in a Mac's internal CD-ROM drive. As there are other USB CD-RW devices reaching the market with faster record speeds, LaCie might be forced to launch a faster model fairly soon, although Toast currently sets the limit by not yet supporting 4x recording of audio CDs.

We had problems trying to create CD-ROMs in some formats. It's not possible to say whether this was to do with Toast, the USB interface, or the drive itself. However, the fact that related problems occur with both the LaCie USB CD-RW and the Que! Drive USB CD-RW (see p43) points to Toast or the USB interface as culprits. Some problems were alleviated by increasing Toast's memory allocation considerably using the Get Info window in the Finder. Other problems could be solved by increasing Toast's RAM cache level in its Preferences, turning off file sharing, and using a 1x writing speed.

Power Mac G3 owners would probably be better off with a SCSI card and conventional CD-R or CD-RW drive. The overall price of a SCSI CD-RW drive and SCSI card is around the same as the LaCie USB CD-RW, and the higher recording speeds make this a more attractive option. But, for iMac users who want to burn CD-ROMs, the speed restriction USB imposes is probably no big deal.