Creative Cdrs - The Creative Blaster CDRW (Creative Blaster CD-RW 121032)

Member Name: declanh

Product:	Creative Blaster CD-RW 121032
Date:	02/10/01 (298 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheap, 'name brand', burn proof

Disadvantages: v poor bundled software

The chose the creative blaster CDRW drive for two reasons :

1 It was cheap - cost me £80
2 It was a recognised name.


Creative are one of the 'household' names when it comes to PC peripherals.

Initialy they concentrated on sound cards - hence the 'blaster' name. But they have recently diversified and now produce a long list of computer gear : DVS/CD Drives, CDRW Drives, Sound Cards (of course), Graphics Cards, Loudspeakers, Web cameras

In practices at least some of the kit is manufactured by other companies and then labelled 'Creative'. A little birdie tells me that this drive was in fact made by a number of manufactuers one of which was the mighty Plextor.


Feature wise the drive is well specified - although specs of this type of gear tend to date very quickly.

The Drive supports 10x for RW 12x For W and 32x for RW. Its also burn-proof (which means you are less likely to make coasters if you surf the net while burning CDs).

Feature wise the drive is excellent and performs flawlessly. I haven't timed it but I think the drive performs roughly to spec. Its possible to burn a CDR from a disk image in less than 5 mins (depends on size of image) and thats pretty good in my book.

On the downside the software provided ...NTI CDMaker 2000 is dire. It really is below par. I hope creative wise up and supply the drive with better software than this. While easy to use the software is not exactly 'feature rich' - its a very poor second cousin to the likes of Nero Burning Rom (and Easy CD Creator - so I'm told). If you want to burn a CDR from MP3s for example you need to convert them all the WAVs first and burn them from these. This makes the process so much more tortuous than say Nero where this can be done in one operation.


All things considered I'm happy with the drive and the price I paid for it. It does the job and I can't complai
n about that.

Summary: