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

Emedia Professional, August, 1998 by Stephen F. Nathans

A CRACK MAC RECORDER WITH RW AND DATA-BOOSTING BONUSES

Longtime Mcintosh faithful who want to extend the ease and simplicity of Macintosh computing to CD recording will appreciate the Optima CDWriter's Mac-friendly feel, and enjoy the same plug-and-play straightforwardness they've come to expect from the platform. One reason developers remain so devoted to the Macintosh is that, besides the quality of Macintosh design tools and the like, its comparably pre-fab system structure and predictable peripheral connections relieve them from nonaesthetic system concerns endemic to PC use. And nowhere is that hands-off approach more valued than in CD-R, whose installation and navigational ins and outs tend to be considered among the more loathsome learning curves facing developers who simply need a reliable and distributable output medium.

While the Optima CDWriter offers much more than low-maintenance data-dumping, with premastering capabilities for multiple CD formats and more, users never need to know it--which is exactly what accidental CD archivers have been after for years. Plug the recorder into the wall and the Mac SCSI port, install CD-R Access Pro in the control panels, and pop in a recordable disc, and you're looking at 650MB to 1300MB of removable storage, depending on how "boostable" your data is. Drag over the files you want to record, and your data is copied. And mastering the latest versions of Toast hardly presents a challenge to a user who's gotten this far; data storage this durable and transferrable (given CD-R's play-in-any-ROM-drive interchangability) doesn't get much easier.

The one drawback of the Optima system is cost. The CDWriter retails for $840, including the CD-R Access Pro software (Toast is an add-on option), which is roughly $100 more than Smart and Friendly's Yamaha 4260T-based CD-R/CD-RW bundle, and $300 more than 4X write-only drives from Yamaha, TEAC, Plextor, and Matsushita. If 650MB CD-R is what users want, they're paying a high premium for the Optima recorder; but if cheap storage with CD-R's universal interchange is what counts, CD-R Access-written discs are the real bargain. Figure in 1.3GB for a $3 CD-R disc, and the CDWriter boosts your cost-per-megabyte savings to a nigh-unbeatable 24 cents.

RELATED ARTICLE: Optima's Diskovery CDWriter 4X/2X/6X CD-RW Drive

Synopsis: Optima's Diskovery CDWriter, the latest in the company's line of Macintosh CD-Recordable bundles, is an external SCSI CD-R/RW drive that uses Yamaha's 4X write/2X rewrite/6X read 4260T mechanism. With the bundled CD-R Access Pro driver and its built-in "data boosting" technology, CDWriter users can perform drag-and-drop, Finder-level incremental writing of up to 1.3GB of data to a standard 6SOMB CD-R or CD-RW disc. Used for playback of a CD-R Access-written disc, the CD-R Access driver doubles the playback speed of any mounted drive. The CDWriter also performs premastering tasks admirably using Adaptec Toast.

System Requirements: Macintosh 68030 or PowerPC running System 7.5 or higher