Optima's Diskovery CDWriter 4X/2X/6X CD-RW drive

Emedia Professional, August, 1998 by Stephen F. Nathans

A wise, not-so-old CD-R sage once told me, as I embarked on my first experiments in desktop recording back in the late-medieval days of January 1996, "CD-Recordable is not a plug-and-play medium." Even working with the widely panned (in this magazine and others) Macintosh version of Incat's Easy CD Pro 2.0, Pioneer's short-lived (as a standalone, anyway) DW-S114X recorder, and a hardly-up-to-the-challenge Mac Performa 630CD with a turgid 2X CD-ROM drive and a badly cluttered hard drive with scarcely 40MB free, I was up and running relatively quickly. Sure, it took me a whole weekend to burn a disc I was really satisfied with, but we're talking about plugging and playing, not perfectionism...

Surprised at how quickly I had my SCSI conflicts resolved and my recorder ready to roll, my CD-R mentor shrugged it off, saying, "Well, who records on Macs anyway?" Developers, that's who. If there's one area where the Macintosh platform claims a larger market share than the otherwise-ubiquitous Wintel PC, it's in the developers' arena. And developers are a key user group for CD-R, given the obvious advantages of cranking out CD-ROM-identical one-offs on demand for prototyping, premastering, and shopping demo versions and treatments of their titles to publishers and would be investors. It's a healthy market and a consistent one, especially for CD-R manufacturers who understand the mild irony that most Mac-based development is geared toward PC playback, and match their products and licensed software accordingly.

No CD recorder vendor has pursued the Macintosh market more vigorously or consistently than Optima Technology Corporation, with their Diskovery line of CD-R drives. The first two models, released in 1996 and 1997, were 2X write/4X read and 2X write/6X read bundles based on Sony drives. The 2X/6X package included an ingenious product of Optima's own authorship, CD-R Access Pro, which uses proprietary "data-boosting" technology to enable incremental, Finder-level copying of up to 1300MB of data to a CD-R disc. The data can then be read back at twice the drive's accredited speed (in other words, the entire 1.3GB of "boosted" data can be read back in the time it would take the drive to read a nonboosted 650MB disc), using the CD-R Access Pro reader.

The latest model, the CDWriter, takes it several steps further, incorporating Yamaha's rock-solid 4260T mechanism to provide the first 4X write/2X rewrite/6X read CD-R/RW drive designed exclusively for the Mac platform. And fortunately, that exclusivity only goes as far as any sensibly positioned product for Mac developers should: Optima also offers Xchange, a Windows/Macintosh file exchange utility that lets Mac users run their CD-R Access Pro-archived graphic databases and such on PC systems.

DOUBLE DENSITY, DOUBLE DUTY: CD-R X 2 AND CD-RW TOO

Two great things about Macintosh-based CD-R and drive letter/finder-level CD-R access on any OS: no host adapters on the hardware end or complex interfaces on the software end. Optima's CDWriter and its accompanying data-boosting software delight on both counts. The writer installs and mounts in a heartbeat, and as soon as you insert the CD-R Access Pro floppy, drag the CD-R Access icon into the Control Panels folder on your startup drive and restart your system, a handy disc icon will appear on your desktop and you can drag-and-drop-to-disc to your heart's content. It's really that simple--but it gets better.

When you install the blank CD-R or CD-RW disc, you get a dialog box asking you to initialize a disc that it identifies as optionally having a "1275MB Max Capacity" (I.3GB minus 25MB for one finalization of the disc's temporary directory). That's because Optima's databoosting compression/file re-structuring technology has virtually doubled the disc's capacity through a two-step process, which includes removing the unused space within a file allocation block, which can save up to 20KB per file; and using a high-speed compressor to reduce file size further.

Boosted CD-R discs can then be read back on any multisession-compatible, CD-R Access Pro-mounted drive; CD-RW discs recorded using the software can be read on any MultiRead unit using the CD-R Access driver. The included CD-R Access Pro User's Guide walks users effectively through the process, with careful and thorough attention to errorhandling, troubleshooting, and advanced features of the software.

CD-R Access Pro was tested on three types of CD-R media, including Maxell, Verbatim DataLife Plus, and the two Optima-branded discs included with the drive, as well as the Sony CD-RW disc included in the CDWriter bundle. The test file set included I. I GB of files of size varying from 20KB to 32MB from multiple folders and paths on a 1.4GB hard drive. The files were dragged from hard drive to disc using the Apple Finder. Writes using many larger, difficult-to-compress files like Red Book-quality audio tracks (which average around 30MB) topped out around 800MB; writes using files of greater size variety pushed somewhat closer to the 1.3GB capacity. The highest capacity reached was just under IGB.