Product Reviews

CD-RW/DVD combination drives have been available with new PCs for some time now, yet in Apple's entire range, only two models - the iBook and the 733MHz Power Mac G4 - offer the choice of a combo drive, and this option comes at a sizeable premium. But Mac users now have another choice in the shape of the the Formac Designer Combo, which costs just under £270.

This high-speed FireWire CD-RW drive can also read DVD-ROM discs. Following the same design as many of Formac's other new products, the drive features soft, almost seductive curves, as well as a metallic finish that goes well with the side-panels of a Power Mac G4, or G4 Cube. Thick, rubber feet wrap around the top of the unit allowing it to be stacked securely with other Formac drives while letting air flow around them unimpeded.

Dig beneath the sleek Formac casing and you'll find a Ricoh mechanism offering 32x read, 12x write, 10x rewrite and 8x DVD read. However, although Formac's casing is more aesthetically pleasing than the dull, beige unit it houses, it does manage to obstruct some of the drive's features. The headphone socket and volume control are rendered totally useless, while concealing the drive's 'busy' light could result in a badly timed FireWire hot-swap.

Even worse, when opening the drive's tray, the front panel folds down making access to the open/ close button all but impossible. This means the tray has to be forcefully pushed to activate its automatic retraction mechanism.

Thankfully, the drive's rubber feet managed to hold up to the challenge of keeping the unit in its rightful place and not slipping off the back of the desk.

Power drill

Power to Formac's Designer Combo is delivered either through an external power adaptor or straight from the FireWire bus. Initially, the idea of powering the device through the FireWire bus sounded ideal, especially

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if using it on the road with a PowerBook.

However, as Formac acknowledges on its Web site, powering the drive from the FireWire bus can potentially cause serious damage to your Mac. And so although it can be done, we strongly recommend powering the device through the adaptor provided.

Despite being both an external, and a non-Apple, device, Apple's DVD Video player recognised the drive with no problems and played DVD movies without a hitch. It's a shame the same can't be said for Roxio's Toast 4.1.2, which ships with the drive.

Despite following Formac's installation instructions to the letter, Toast failed to recognise the drive as a supported CD-RW device. However, a quick call to Formac's technical support, a few system tweaks and a restart later and the unit was raring to go.

Read your writes

At 12x write, the Formac Designer Combo certainly isn't the fastest CD burner on the market (20x writers are now hitting the shelves and 24x writers aren't far behind), but for most users 12x is fast enough. From start to finish, a 60-minute audio CD took just shy of six minutes to copy, while a data CD of similar size, 566Mb, took just over six minutes.

As with many of the latest high-speed CD-RWs, the Formac Designer Combo features Burn-Proof technology to abolish buffer underrun errors that can lead to useless discs and wasted time. As Burn-Proof-enabled drives don't rely on a steady data stream, they allow CDs to be burned in the background, so you can work in applications while you burn.

If the data stream is interrupted, the drive simply stops and waits until the stream can catch up, then starts again. Unfortunately, you'll need to upgrade your software to be able to take advantage of this feature. The version of Toast supplied doesn't support background burning. Additionally, the Combo drive is still awaiting Mac OS X compatibility. However, Formac assures us it won't be too long in coming.

At £269, the Formac Designer Combo is moderately more expensive than a similarly specified CD-RW. However, it's well worth it for the additional functionality. It's a shame the overall look of the drive has taken precedence over a couple of its features and it won't be for you if you need the fastest drive available, or if your Mac doesn't have a FireWire port. But for everyone else, this drive is definitely worth consideration.

NEEDS: Power Mac, Mac OS 8, 24Mb RAM, 30Mb hard disk space, CD-ROM drive