Product Reviews

It's almost a year since we conducted a round-up of CD-RW drives (see Hardware Labs, 15 June 2001 p62) and the fastest drives available peaked at 16x10x40 performance levels (16x for CD-R, 10x for CD-RW and 40x for CD-ROM).

Since then, several companies have released drives that increase the CD-R performance to 24x and now LaCie claims to be the first to release a CD-RW drive which runs at 32x10x40. Prices have come down, too. The 16x drive LaCie submitted for our last review was priced at a fairly substantial £249, but this model costs a more reasonable £159.

The drive retains the brick-like appearance of its predecessor, with only a blue plastic front panel providing any degree of visual flair. The unit measures about eight inches wide, two inches high and almost a foot deep, so you'll need a fair amount space on your desk. The blue front panel obscures the volume control and headphone socket on the front of the drive, but any Mac with a FireWire interface will also have its own CD-ROM and headphone connectors, so this isn't such a problem.

LaCie's 16x drive had both USB and FireWire ports on the back of the unit, which got the thumbs up from the MacUser Labs team as it meant the drive could be used with older Macs. The new model drops the USB port and replaces it with a second FireWire port. That's not a problem, though, as a drive this fast really needs the speed of the FireWire interface to perform at full speed. Having a second FireWire port on the drive instead of a USB port

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also means you can daisy-chain another FireWire device off the drive, such as an iPod or external hard drive.

Hard copy

Installing the drive is very straightforward. LaCie includes a copy of Toast Lite 5.0.2, which has a good set of disk burning and copying features, so you simply install Toast and connect the drive's power and FireWire cables. Our only reservation is that Toast Lite isn't compatible with Mac OS X, and the drive isn't supported by Apple's Disk Burner software under OS X. There's an OS X version of Toast Lite due soon, but LaCie was unable to confirm whether it would be offering an upgrade option for owners of the Classic version. If you want to use this drive in OS X, you'll need to upgrade to Toast 5.1 Titanium. We would also like to see a printed manual with the drive.

Under Mac OS 8.6 or Mac OS 9, the 32x drive works very well, although its performance isn't quite as barn-storming as the 32x figure implies. It took the drive three minutes and 45 seconds to write 645Mb of data onto a blank CD-R. That's certainly faster than any of the 16x drives we've reviewed, which took an average of 5.5 minutes to perform the same task, but it's not twice as fast.

Fire safety

However, we're pleased to see LaCie has added a Burn-Proof feature to the drive. This feature improves the drive's reliability and eliminates the buffer underrun fault that sometimes ruins blank disks.

In fact, LaCie has implemented two fail-proof mechanisms. It uses standard Burn-Proof fault-checking and a new mechanism devised by Sanyo called FlexSS (flexible speed/ flexible strategy) which enables the drive to check the blank disk during recording to ensure it can cope with the incoming stream of data.

The other aspects of the drive are the same as for the 16x model. Both models perform closer to 8x than 10x when it comes to CD-RW performance, but that's only a minor quibble. The combination of improved performance and lower price make this a very attractive option for anyone that needs a new CD-RW drive. However, LaCie needs to add OS X support in a hurry.