Plextor W4824TU USB 2.0

The team of CD-RW drives nominated an external drive from Plextor, W4824TU, for the tests. The drive works with the USB 2.0 interface. The stylish case is made of dull-luster metal, except the false panels. The front panel carries the eject button, headphones socket and volume control wheel, and a status LED.

The rear panel of the device is equipped with a power-on and self-diagnostics buttons, 12V power connector, USB port, and two composite audio outputs (for the left and right channels).

The drive can read and write CD-R disks at an up to 48x speed and rewrite CD-RW at 24x speed. Its buffer size is 4MB. By default, the read speed of the model is 40x, but you can increase it to 48x by enabling the SpeedRead option.

The drive comes with a power adapter, user’s manual, USB cable, special wire for removing the stuck discs and two CDs with software. Besides, we found a few blank media in the package: five CD-R and one CD-RW disc.

As a medium for this drive we used a 650MB Verbatim CD-RW 24x costing $1.

Ricoh MP5125A-DP

The fast-progressing class of DVD-burners is represented by Ricoh MP1525A-DP. The front panel is all covered with various symbols and logos and is equipped with the eject button, status LED, headphones socket and volume control wheel. The back panel accommodates power supply and interface connectors, digital and analog audio outputs, and a pin set with a jumper.

This model works with the ATAPI interface (UDMA/2 mode). Its speed characteristics are claimed to be as follows: 2.4x DVD+R/RW burn, 8x DVD-ROM read, 12x CD-R and 10x CD-RW burn, 32x CD-ROM read. Average access time is 140ms for DVDs and 120ms for CDs. The cache-buffer of the device is 2MB big.

The drive comes with a lot of accessories: a quickstart user guide in multiple languages, two CDs with software, four blank media (DVD+R 4x, DVD+RW 2.4x, CD-R 24x and CD-RW 10x), IDE and audio cables and a set of screws.

We used a 4.5GB DVD+RW disc from Verbatim (2.4x) selling for $4.5.