Ricoh MP9060A CD-R/RW & DVD-ROM Drive - Hardware Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, March, 2000 by Michelle Manafy

around my house, we have a definite fondness for all-purpose, everything-under-the-sun-and-a-spoon-tools, like the kind made by Victorinox, the Swiss Army people. We have them in many configurations, but the most recent addition was the new and improved Swiss Tool with (count 'em) 24 features. It serves a multitude of purposes and has definite size and convenience advantages over carrying around a complete set of its full-sized counterparts. For similar reasons, the MP9060A, Ricoh's multipurpose CD-R/ RW, DVD-ROM drive--the first of its kind in commercial release--has instant appeal.

When I popped the hood on my computer to install the ATAPI drive, I had my trusty Swiss Tool in hand. The foldout needle-nosed pliers came In handy to adjust the jumper pins. (It seems odd that companies still use hard-to-grasp jumpers when others like Kenwood offer a handy tab that is much easier to get a grip on.) Hardware installation was not difficult except perhaps that, though the supplied audio cable uses a standard four-pin connector to the DVD-ROM and offers an additional connector to the audio card, the directions don't provide any guidance on which of the connectors is optimal.

The directions do, however, explicitly state that the drive can be configured as master or slave. After being set up as the slave, the MP9060A was recognized by the computer, but it would not read any type of media and the drive's "BUSY" light blinked, signalling that the device was not ready. A call to Ricoh customer support yielded the useful information that DVD-ROM drives don't perform well as slaves to a CD-ROM drive. Upon further discussions with Ricoh, it turns out this is one of tech support's standard troubleshooting lines and that DVD-ROM drive performance as master or slave varies widely depending upon system configuration.

Drive reconfigured and hardware installation complete on the test-bed 350mHz Pentium II, I used the 24X Max Ricoh CD-ROM reader to install the included Adaptec Direct CD and Easy CD Creator software. The drive's read speed, while not the fastest on the market, performed as well as other 24X CAV CD-ROM drives. A good bundle can make or break the value of a CD-R/RW drive, and the inclusion of these two tried-and-true programs speaks well for the MP9060A. Both programs include the ubiquitous wizard for easy installation.

tools of the trade

Easy CD Creator (like its Mac cousin, Toast) is one of the most popular software choices for audio extraction. It includes one of those exceedingly cute little help characters to walk the novice through CD creation, as well as drag-and-drop ease. Easy CD Creator also allows the user to create CDs of all data types and supports CD-to-CD direct copy, track-at-once, disc-at-once, and multisession recording. The software's default recording speed is 6X, the same as the Ricoh drive (it also supports 1X, 2X, and 4X).

Extraction with Easy CD Creator is as simple as selecting an audio track from a disc and clicking the extract button. Creating a playlist is just an easy a drag-and-drop proposition. The drive performs digital audio extraction at speeds pretty typical of DAE-supporting 24X CAV drives; a typical extract found the drive a six-minute, 34-second audio track in a mere 38 seconds.

The first burn effort with the provided Ricoh 650MB media stopped after only five tracks, reporting that the media was out of room and, unfortunately, didn't run the close program to allow the disc to be read. But during my second attempt with Ricoh media, the drive's write performance was as-advertised 6X, recording a 648MB (73:45) CD-Audio disc in roughly 15 minutes. Though Ricoh says the drive supports 80-minute media, during tests with the extended media, the drive sent a "disc full" message at 522MB, 178MB short of the disc's 700MB capacity.

Because the 4X CD-RW feature of the MP9060A is most useful for backup, the inclusion of DirectCD in the bundle (not to mention a Ricoh MultiSpeed CD-RW disc) is a wise one. DirectCD formats a CD-RW disc to allow the user to play it on any computer equipped with DirectCD. The drive provides 4X rewrite speed, and tests using the provided Ricoh CD-RW DirectCD-formatted disc did perform as expected. Repeated uses of the disc did not decrease its initial usable capacity of 529MB.

DirectCD includes the option of allowing compression on an unformatted disc in order to increase its size, which in the case of the Ricoh disc, was 648MB. Quick formatting, which writes DirectCD file structures to the disc, but does not verify the physical condition of the disc, only takes a few minutes.

The full-format option takes about an hour to complete, but it configures the disc to receive data, verifies the integrity of the disc surface, as well as writing DirectCD file system structures to the disc. Once a disc has been formatted, it is as easy to use as any floppy disk. Data can be saved to it, dragged-and-dropped to it in Windows Explorer, or placed on the disc using the send to command. CD-RW discs can be erased as easily as selecting the files and hitting delete.