Product Reviews

The industry is awash with CD-RWs, but what distinguishes One Technologies' HighFly CD-RW is its price - it's one of the first 24x FireWire CD burners to cost less that £200.

The HighFly FireWire CD-RW burns 24x, rewrites at 10x and offers playback at 40x. It comes in a sliver and black finish, which fits in nicely with Apple's latest Power Mac G4 colour scheme. The metallic finish is prone to scratching, though. The drive has a 2Mb buffer to help prevent buffer underrun errors (caused when the Mac can't supply data quickly enough to keep up with the recorder) and comes with Roxio's Toast 5 for CD burning.

Setting up the software was a bit confusing and required two separate installations. We sought help from One Technologies' Web site, but this simply referred us to a premium-rate helpline in Germany. However, the company assured us that this was being addressed.

With the software problems resolved and the drive connected, Toast immediately recognised the HighFly. In our tests,

ADVERTISEMENT

a 600Mb file took just under three minutes to write to a CD-R at 24x. This is equivalent to a blistering 3.33Mb/sec. Writing the same data on a rewritable CD took around seven minutes at 10x, or 1.5Mb/sec. The buffer underrun prevention, which prevents runtime errors while copying data to the HighFly CD burner, works well. In the event of a problem, the recording speed is automatically cut until the data transfer rate increases to a point where it can support the drive's full speed.

Any FireWire-enabled Mac can use one of two built-in FireWire ports on the HighFly, leaving the other free for daisychaining to other devices. However, as the drive is a full-sized unit, the FireWire ports on the HighFly don't support Bus Power modes, so power has to be drawn from the mains supply. This isn't a big issue because the drive is intended as a desktop device and not designed to be portable. It's also advisable to put the HighFly at the beginning of a chain, or better still, to have it on its own bus.

The HighFly also includes audio in and out ports. To top it all off, it comes with a FireWire cable, which can save another £20 or £30.

For a 24x speed FireWire CD burner costing less than £200, the HighFly offers everything including cables, manuals and Toast (albeit not the full Titanium version), as well as a two-year warranty.

The software installation and technical support could have been better, but overall the performance of the drive was excellent and matched that of more expensive devices. What else could a budget-conscious user want from a FireWire CD-RW burner?