Yamaha 16/10/40 IDE CD-RW review..

In the ultimate real world test, which consists of just burning an entire 700MB CD to it's full length, the Yamaha drive narrowly beat out the Plextor drive by scoring times of 5 minutes and 7 minutes, respectively. Burning an entire 700 MB CD in just over 5 minutes is simply amazing, and certainly makes CD-R burning a less of a hassle, seeing as how while burning there was only around a 30% loss in CPU strength, which is plenty of enough power left over to use your machine for day to day tasks.



For those of you who just can't stand a loss in CPU performance while burning, word is Yamaha is also planning Ultra SCSI and Firewire versions of this exact drive for high-end users. Of course, they will be more expensive than the drive we're looking at today, but should give noticeable gains in overall system speed while burning.



In comparison with the Plextor, of course the Yamaha is a little faster, but with that added speed comes added noise. Everyone has their own opinions on if they're willing to sacrifice some decibel levels for some added CD speed, we're not going to tell you which is better than the other. In our opinion, the Plextor seems like a much more rounded package compared to the Yamaha, but that's not to say the Yamaha isn't a great drive in itself.