Hewlett Packard 9100i 8x4x32 Internal IDE CDRW Drive

by HP

Product Details

Product Manual [1.67mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00004S64Q
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 4, 1999

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The Hewlett-Packard 9100i is an internal IDE drive that is a complete solution for saving data, photos, music, and more. With 8x write, 4x rewrite, and 32x read speeds, this drive lets you save your files to CD quickly and cost-effectively. Setup for the Hewlett Packard 9100i is easy because everything you need is already in the box; there's no need to buy extra cables or adapter cards. This drive records up to 650 megabytes of data or up to 74 minutes of audio on each CD, and recording on CD keeps your files safe, accessible, and transferable for years to come.

Included in the box is a variety of powerful software packages that let you do more than store data, including Adaptec Direct CD, Adaptec Easy CD Creator, HP Disaster Recovery, Filing Central by eFax.com, Broderbund Print Shop Multimedia Organizer Professional, and Corel Print Office.

Until December 30, 2000, when you purchase an HP CD-writer, you can receive 60 days of free MP3 music downloads from Emusic.com. Click here for the coupon and details.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

153 of 157 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best computing product I've ever purchased, May 8, 2000

By 

Digilante - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hewlett Packard 9100i 8x4x32 Internal IDE CDRW Drive (Personal Computers)

I have been in computing for almost 20 years now, and never has a product impressed me all round as this one has. Installation of the unit and the drivers is a breeze - the manual is reasonably decent too.

The bundled software is the real bonus though: For example, DirectCD allows you to use a CD-RW as a floppy disk - just drag and drop files onto and off the disk which is "mounted" just like another drive. The Multimedia Organiser is a good product too - it can be used to catalogue and keep track of all your (for example) image files on a CD-R.

What is also nice, is that each time you insert blank media, be it a CD-R or CD-RW, a menu pops up with a sort of "Idiot's Guide To Writing A CD" type of thing. It's a very simple and easy way to create the type of CD that you want.

Other than that, there's a whole host of additional functionality and goodies - such as the free Neato CD labelling kit together with printing templates.

For important storage I only use HP branded CDs, and have never had a problem. As for other brands, the cheaper discs can sometimes fail, but this is caused by faulty CD production and not by the HP CD writer.

Saving the best for last, the speed is fantastic. At 8X a full CD-R takes well under 10 minutes from start to finish. Writing to a CD-RW is obviously slower at 4X, but it's good enough unless you're backing up your 20 gig harddrive each Friday :-)

In summary, an all round fantastic product at a most competitive price. Go and get one.

86 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good product, good value, June 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Hewlett Packard 9100i 8x4x32 Internal IDE CDRW Drive (Personal Computers)

I have used a number of HP's products in the past and find that this is yet another really good investment. I love to use it for making my music CDs and now that I have a digital camera and digital camcorder, I will be using it for storage as well.

As to the comments made by another reviewer, you can use music discs you create in your car (I have 5 right now in mine!). The only thing you have to do is burn the disc in one sitting. Any CD-RW drive creates a menu at the beginning of the disc. This is read by your CD-ROM or CD player telling it how many titles/items are on it. If that menu is broken up by writing the data in multiple sessions, it will be unreadable by any player other than a CD-RW drive. So if you plan to make music CDs you can listen to other than at your computer, plan them out and burn in one session, otherwise, you're SOL. :)

56 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great value despite bad experiences with certain disks, April 25, 2000

By 

Carl Lim - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hewlett Packard 9100i 8x4x32 Internal IDE CDRW Drive (Personal Computers)

As this is my first CD writer, I'm not sure how it compares w/competing products, but this is great value for a very useful computer add-on. Primarily, I use it for backing up my PC, storing digital photos & other documents, passing digital photos to my friends and family, and making my own audio CDs.

In my Win98 system, I did run into slow performances and occassional hangs when writing onto CompUSA 2x CDRW disks. The fault may lie with the 2x disks, because with the 4x CDRW disks (also from CompUSA), I've had no problems and the speed is impressive.

I really love the DirectCD software, which lets me write to the disk from any programs just like a hard drive. The CD Creator program is fine for making audio CDs, but nothing beats being able to simply drag & drop files from Windows Explorer to the CD. This is perfect for storing important but large file sets (such as my digital photos) that are frequently accessed and added to.

I considered getting a tape backup drive last year; I'm glad I waited because this works great as a backup drive--speedy and easy to access. I can't archive GBs of data at a time, but it's just fine for backing up selected files & directories.