Customer Reviews

CenDyne 6x4x32 EIDE Internal CD-RW Drive (PC Only)

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Without question, this is the best deal you're going to find this holiday season on a CDR/W. First of all, don't let the fact that you're not familiar with the name CenDyne fool you; this IS a Ricoh 7063A, a very widely supported model and respected manufacturer. I worked in tech support for another CDR manufacturer, and Ricoh is one of the few brands I'll put in my own machine at home. As for reviewer Bob who gives this wonderful drive a measly 2 stars because it doesn't work with his Adaptec software; you need to update your software. For those of you who have Easy CD Creator 4.0, get the free update to 4.02 from Adaptec's website - this drive has been supported by it for nearly a year now. But who cares? Nero blows it out of the water, and is provided for free. Faster, smaller, and quite simply better. Other software I'm using with this drive: Audiograbber, CloneCD (lets you make an exact copy of any CD, even with copy protection), INCD, Golden Hawk and FireBurner. It takes about 11 minutes to burn a 700meg/80min CDR to capacity. I've almost went through a spindle of blanks in the 2 weeks I've had this drive, and have yet to burn a coaster. Tip: This drive ships with v1.50 of it's firmware; I would suggest getting the newest (v1.80 at the time of this writing) from CenDyne's website and flashing the unit to nip any compatibility problems in the bud first thing. All in all, a wonderful drive for the price, I can't recommend it enough.

The drive is the OEM version (RW7063A) of popular Ricoh/MET MP7063A. The drive works very well even with the cheaper media available on the market (I've tried Ritek and CMC manufactured cheapies). As with other IDE burners without the new Burn-proof option, care should be taken on multitasking while CD is being burned to avoid buffer underruns. The real plus of this burner is the DAE (digital audio extraction) capability. It is able to rip audio tracks at average speed of ~18x (min ~10x, max ~30x). So if you are into creating MP3 files, this drive is for you. Although there are faster drives on the market, this is very nice drive for the price.

I was given this drive as an early Xmas gift. It's really a nice drive, and a great price. No, its not the fastest with all the wizbang, but it WORKS with no extras needed, other than a box (or more :-)) of CDR/CDRW media!

The software included, Nero, is better than basic as well. I'm a certified systems engineer dealing with this kind of equipment at work daily. While I wouldn't buy this drive for business because of name recognition, supply channels, etc, at home it is the best we found. My criteria of price, performance, and nice to have features made this a surprising gift come early...

No, its not the fastest wizbang gonna do everything for 'ya drive. But it is an EXCELLENT value, and it does do what matters - audio, data, .jpegs, etc, at speeds that are reasonable. Probably not a good choice for businesses, but if this is for your home pc and you've been waiting because CDRW drives are still too expensive, don't wait any longer! Write once, or write many. Comes with decent software that handles the basics - no its not adaptec, but who cares! - especially if you've got a hard drive full of mp3s! The end result is a rom that works on any machine. YOU DON'T NEED ADAPTEC TO BURN! If you are at all PC saavy, this drive is the best thing for the money! If you are not, maybe get a friend to read the ad and look at your machine making sure you have slots avail etc., maybe get help installing the drive internally if you are shy -- nothing special here, a regular internal drive.

After answering the common sense can I add it to my PC question, buy it - you will be glad you did! Mine has worked flawlessly on several burns and took about 30 minutes to install. Thank you Cendyne and Amazon!

I was surprised at how well this burner worked and how many features it had. It was a matter of minutes to install and set up on my Win2K machine. The Nero software is very good if you've had experience burning CDs. A very nice feature is the ability to burn CD-Text info on audio CDs from data you enter or from the online CDDB lookup performed by Nero. Overall it's almost as good as my Yamaha unit which cost almost twice as much and is only an 8x.

Who the hell is Cendyne? I bet that's what you are thinking. Well, I had not heard of them either. But that's not important.

What is important is what's inside. ...what you will be getting is a quality Ricoh 6x4x32x drive inside, instead of one of those not so reliable drives from the second or third tier manufacturers.

Ricoh makes one of the best CDR/W drives along with Yamaha and Sony. You might be thinking, "How about HP?". No, HP does not make their drives. They are made by Sony. HP only slaps their blue logo on it. Of course, Plextor makes better drives than any of them, but you will be paying 2 - 3 times more for them.

Yes, it does work with Adaptec 4.0 as long as you get the free update from the Adaptec site. Also, it has a good 2MB buffer.

It seems that some people had a problem with this drive. Well, installing an IDE CDR/W (not only this Ricoh drive, but also any other IDE drives) could be tricky especially if you have a non-Intel chipset based motherboard. If you have a VIA chipset based motherboard, make sure to update the busmaster driver (VIA 4in1 driver) from VIA's website. You don't know what motherboard you have? Just go to Control Panel => System => Device Manager and see what you have in your System Devices. Also make sure to enable the DMA support.

I'm not sure what Rheumor's deal is, but frankly, I haven't got a ton of money to throw around and like most people I want to make my own CDs and mp3s, and yes, heaven forbid, I have a PC. This unit works great, I'm psyched to have it.

CDRW drives are becoming more and more common in PC systems today. With recordable media, it is easy to make backups of critical data and programs. Music fans can create their own mixes and/or selections of songs. This drive performs both of these functions well. The necessary cables, software, and instructions are included. Unfortunately, this drive is not compatible with Apdatec software.

As an earlier review said, this is a rebranded Ricoh RW7063A. It works well enough in Linux (I'm using Debian 2.2, kernel 2.2.17) if you follow the CD-Writing HOWTO steps. Curiously, sometimes I need to manually eject the disk after writing (or test-writing) before it will recognise the written disk, but that's no big deal.

"cdrecord" is happy with it, as is "cdrdao" when you tell it to use the generic-mmc driver. cdrdao takes a lot longer to read audio tracks from this drive than does cdparanoia however.

Two tips: believe it when the specs say "Pentium 166 or faster required"; my 150mmx has almost but not quite enough horses to write at 6X (it works fine at 4X though). And don't believe it when it says "comes with 80-minute CDR blank"; mine came with a 74-min one. Then again, for this price I'm not complaining.

I reviewed favorable previous without even knowing the NERO software bundled with this drive includes "INCD" as a separate install. INCD lets Windows 95/98/ME users make the CDRW function just like a 550MB floppy. *Nice*. When you put in a blank disk, the INCD software prompts if you wish to burn with NERO (traditional formats) or format for INCD (use like a floppy in the OS). I've since shared this drive out on my home network and leverage on the fly storage to INCD formatted CDRWs from all my machines.

I had to struggle a bit on the INCD install. NERO installed without a hitch, but for INCD I needed to rename a .dll in a system directory in order for the installer to work. This is not for the uninitiated. All the info you need can be found buried on the software manufacturer website, the address was stamped on the packaging when I opened it.

The INCD file format is maybe a bit proprietary, but a free runtime driver is available on the aforementioned web site letting you take these "floppy" disks to other 95/98/ME machines. I have yet to try that, and I'm guessing supported CD drives may be limited for this more advanced use. Check the supplied docs and web address for details.

Again, I'm very happy with this purchase. The above software is very good, and its FREE with the purchase of this already bargain priced hardware!