Piece of junk! (Teac CDW54E)

Member Name: voodoochilli

Product:	Teac CDW54E
Date:	20/06/02 (133 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: looks nice, can read scratched disks

Disadvantages: slow, slow, slow

I own a Que! USB CDRW. Its main component is the Teac CD-W54E, which would normally be a good bit of kit, so they say, had it not been used in conjunction with USB. Incase you don't know much about USB , it stands for Universal Serial Bus, it was created by Apple and I am sad to say it is very slow. I was going to buy a Predator drive but the salesman on the phone said the QUE! drive was better, and he didn't have any Predator drives in stock anyway.

My CDRW will only burn at 2 times normal CD speed and not the measly 4 times it says on the case. Sometimes it used to crash, saying "buffer under run", or some other useless remark similar to what my ZX Spectrum used to say- syntax error....

That was until I managed to get hold of Toast 5 which implements a new kind of software where by the CD drive is now prepared to wait (to some extent) for the flow of data. Still I can only get double speed, which ain't exactly great when you have strict deadlines to work to.

A friend of mine said it was because I had recently put a USB card into my old computer, and it didn't come with it installed and so my computer just wasn't fast enough. I proved him wrong by testing the drive on a top spec G4 worth over £2000. Buffer under run.....

Another disadvantage to this drive is that it doesn't play audio directly into my computer. If you want play a CD, you have to plug in a lead from the drive into the computers microphone socket.

The only advantage of this device is cosmetic, it looks nice- but that is something particular to the QUE drive. It doesn't loo0k anything like the little picture at the top of this page, it actually looks like a squashed imac. Shame it isn't as useful. I suppose it does the job though. Also it does manage to read disks that my other drive can't, probably because of the newer technology.


so why does this particular piece of equipment claim it can write
up to quad speed? Because the component, the actual drive can, its just that USB is blatantly too slow to keep up to speed. My recommendation to you is buy firewire or SCSI peripherals. Or save £200 for when DVD RW or cheaper.

Summary: