Installation

The drive is an IDE drive, so installation was a breeze. I installed it as primary master and ensured all jumpers were correct. The drive was detected in Windows without any problems and I disabled auto insert notification and rebooted.

It took around 15mins from disassembling the machine to having the software installed and the drive ready for use. As you can see the firmware on this drive is 1.65. The drive was shipped with firmware 1.55 and was later upgraded to 1.65, but there was no real difference between 1.55 and 1.65 that we noticed.

Our review drive was an April 2001 model that came shipped with firmware version 1.55 -- which I later upgraded to 1.65. I used DiskJuggler 3.50.800, NERO 5.5.5.1 & VOB Instant CD/DVD version 6.0.2.88.

Here the latest (5.5.5.1) NERO version also supports the drive but does not detect the burnproof features of the drive. CD-TEXT and overburning CDs is also supported. You can also see the 2MB recording buffer.

This is a DiscJuggler capabilities screenshot, it is generally more accurate than most software at revealing what a drive can and can't do. The important features to note are that CD-TEXT and ACCURATE DAE is supported and that it doesn't support reading of sub-channel data.

The drive is rated at a reasonable x24 for reading data and audio CDs.

Page 2 - Last Updated: 21 October 2001