Tom's Hardware made a roundup of three CD-R/RW drives, a budget, midrange and a highend drive. The drives in this test are the Mitsumi CR4805TE that writes at 8 speed, the Aopen CRW1232A that writes at 12 speed and the Yamaha CRW2100E who is able to write your CD's at 16 speed. The last two use the somekind of burnproof techonology, and the Mitsumi has a 2Mb buffer.
This is what they wanted to know:
|
Yamaha, AOpen and Mitsumi have different products for different sectors of the market. We wanted to know whether it makes sense to purchase a high-end drive like the Yamaha CRW2100E or if a simple mainstream drive will suffice.
|
And this is a part of their conclusion:
|
In any case we should not forget that all of these models are meant to be CD writers to begin with and all three fulfill their tasks reliably. As for the bundled software - all of them are adequate for creating audio or data CDs, although I personally prefer Nero (Demo available at www.ahead.de). Yamaha ships the drive with the best add-ons, AOpen offers one of the most balanced CD recorders and Mitsumi provides a low-cost solution for those who do not require high-speed write modes and are on a tight budget.If you are not looking for any particular CD recorder, the Mitsumi drive is definitely worth its money, but be aware of buffer underruns - try to avoid them by keeping the workload of your system low while writing your CD. People who want more performance, excellent software and expedient audio-grabbing features should spend a bit more money and buy the AOpen drive.
Yamaha's CRW2100E is a state-of-the art drive that is recommended for all who record a large quantity of discs. Although its performance as a standard CD reader is only moderate, you will get excellent recording performance, a huge buffer and superior audio-grabbing capabilities in exchange. |
Intresting article but it's conclusion is as expected, for less money you will get a reliable burner, but if you burn a lot of CD's you better get yourself a high-end drive.
Source: Toms Hardware
