speedy scuzzy (Yamaha CRW8424S-VK)

Member Name: luke_

Product:	Yamaha CRW8424S-VK
Date:	12/08/01 (1271 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to install, large 4mb buffer

Disadvantages: Slower compared to the lastest writers, You have to buy a seperate scsi card, SCSI drive can be more expensive than IDE

Previous to buying this CD writer I have owned 2 slow IDE writers, both 2x. A Mitsumi and a Phillips. Both suffered from buffer under runs and all sorts of problems. I think I made more tea coasters than functional CDs.

Considering I would probably be spending more on buying new CDrs than I would to buy a decent new CD writer that was fast and reliable I set about looking for a nice shiny new one.

Reading many of the reviews, I finally decided this Yamaha model was for me. Quite a fast drive having 8x write, 4x re write and 24x read. Because of the buffer under runs I had with my older drives which had only 1mb buffers I new I had to get a drive with a larger buffer and the Yamaha has a 4mb buffer which is quite large even by today’s latest CD writers. I had never really thought of getting a SCSI drive but as it was in my price range I decided to try it.

I purchased an Adaptec SCSI card and installed that previous to the drive arriving and installed that very easily.

The drive came in a fairly large box with some large poster type manuals with easy to understand instructions. Fitting the drive in to my case was very easily done with the provided screws. Although I am pretty experienced at installing and upgrading computer hardware this could be installed by some one less experienced very easily and hopefully trouble free if you read the instructions carefully.

I connected the SCSI cable up to the card and booted up my computer, windows 2000 picked up the drive successfully and it was shown in ‘My computer’ as another CD drive so no driver installation was needed which was great.

The software provided was Easy CD Creator which personally I don’t like very much but it’s a very good program for those new to creating their own CDs. I chose to use a program called Nero burning ROM which is the best piece of burning software I have used. Its full of feature to create custom data CDs, musi
c CDs, copy and original CD, create VCDs, SVCDs and create a CD from an image of a CD on your hard disk. This picked up the CD writer and supported it without the need for any extra drivers but some programs in windows 2000 require you to download another ASPI layer driver for the SCSI. This can be found easily by searching google.com


The 1st CD I created was a backup of all my downloaded games patches and small utilities that I regularly use. This recorded in about 6 minutes at 8 speed write with no problems and the CD worked in my CD drive no problems what so ever. When burning a full CD with lots of data the CD take longer to write, but still only about 8 minutes which is a lot better than the 30+ minutes it used to take my old drives to do. Although it does have a 4x re write function I have never used it as CDr discs are so cheap now to buy any way I don't use CDRW discs.

Since I have had the writer, I’ve had no problems with it and never any buffer under runs proving the 4mb buffer to be more than sufficient. I have only made 2 tea coasters since I have had the drive and they weren’t because of an error with the drive but because of me trying to put more data on the CD than it could take.

I have never had to use any type of customer services at Yamaha because the drive has been 100% reliable and I would certainly consider buying another product from Yamaha in the future.

Summary: