Good Performer (HP Surestore CD-Writer Plus 9310i)

Member Name: TUVOK

Product:	HP Surestore CD-Writer Plus 9310i
Date:	31/08/01 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quality Brand, Easy installation Instructions, 10 speed writing for £80

Disadvantages: Software "functional"

I had been anxious to buy a cdrw for some time so that I could archive important files from my hard drive and also to give extra storage space as my hard drive is only 6.4 GB, tiny in comparison to todays monster drives, and its only 2 years old!

I finally picked this one up from Dixons who were selling it as an end of line product reduced to £89.99 with 10% off making total price £80.99. At this price I could not afford to miss out - sod the credit card I thought.

Hewlett Packard are reliable and have good technical support so I knew I was getting a bargain. Instructions are superb and make installation easy - for most people. My problem was that my Pc is a Compaq Mini Tower and to actually fit the drive I had to remove the modem, graphics card, motherboard and hard drive!!

The drive works very well and writes at 10 speed, rewrites at 4 speed and reads at 32 speed, all acceptable for my machine which has 500mhz processor and 128mb ram. The buffer is 4mb which is quite generous.

The software is Adaptec Direct CD for moving data files to CD and Hewlett Packards own "MyCd" for copying Music which can be upgraded, its probably not the greatest, does not let you copy mp3 files to Wav format, (nero does) which is what is required to allow playback on Home cd's, but again this is not a problem as there are loads of free programs available on the net which are purely for converting mp3 to wav format. But it does the job and unlike other manufacturers has the ability to format a cd in less then 5 minutes which prepares it for burning.

The unit took just 7 minutes to burn 650mb of files onto a 650mb CD which is impressive.I will also write the 700mb CD's which again is impressive, this is an "older model" and HP usually dont write to anything except 650mb as far as I was aware. It took about 9 minutes from start to finish to format and write 700mb of data to disc - excellent.

All in all
an excellent model, solid build, good tech support although you shouldnt need it, and great price! Buy one while you can.

UPDATE 30/11/01. This machine is proving extremely reliable and Although there are cheaper faster drives now available, I am very happy with the reliability and value that this unit has given.

Summary: