Class Act (Ricoh 9060A)

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Product:	Ricoh 9060A
Date:	12/12/00 (8 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast

Disadvantages: Expensive

Ricoh were the first to produce a combo drive. The MP9060A has been around for a few months now, but still holds up well under test. The single drive takes CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs and DVDs, all in the same tray mechanism. It comes bundled with the excellent Nero 4.0 CD-R burning software from Ahead and the same companies inCD packet writing utility. Without packet writing, you can't drag and drop from a CD-RW disc but, with it, you can treat the disc as a rather large (arond 650Mb) floppy drive.

It takes about 18 minutes to format a blank CD-RW disc on a 4 speed rewriter the first time you do it. After that it's just a few seconds for a re-format. I copied a mixed basket of files, totalling 100Mb and including everything from little 10K efforts up to 20Mb monsters to and from the CD-RW. The results showed that the Ricoh drive was quick at CD-RW - about the same speed as a zip.

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