Customer Reviews

I/O Magic DRCD52 52x Internal IDE CD-ROM Drive

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just bought this product today. installs fast (took literally a minute to hook up) ,works good and cheap to boot.

I owned one of these magic cdrom drives and it lasted about a
year...I have had other products from magic and they are cheap. Needless to say, I now stay away from magic. Get a Plextor

I would highly recommend not buying any prodcuct sold by IO Magic under any of their brand names (I/O Magic, Hi-Val and Digital Research). There is a high chance you'll be buying a piece of junk and if you ever need support, you will not get it because they don't believe in providing their customers with support.

As a word of caution, I have just received my second replacement drive for the CDRW 48X16X48 drive I bought less than a year ago, and the second replacement drive is also defective!!!!
The original drive worked well up until about 2.5 months ago so I contacted the IO Magic RMA department, got an RMA number and sent the drive to them. After a few weeks I got a replacement drive (which was not branded as IO Magic and had a different faceplate from the one I sent in) an lo-and-behold, it was also defective... It could burn disks at 12X and lower, anything higher than that and the disk would be full of errors (checked using Nero's CD Quality check). I wasted four CD-Rs from different manufacturers finding this out.

So I send them another email, telling them the replacement drive was bad as well. After about a week I got a reply that said 'sorry about that, here is a new RMA # and we'll have UPS come pick up the drive within 2 business days'.

'Well that's nice', I thought. And it would have been if only they had picked up the drive, which they didn't. A week later after sending them an email (generating no response) about why they had not picked up the drive, I gave up and sent it to them on my own nickel.

Now I have received the replacement drive for the replacement drive and I am almost 100% sure they just sent me back the same drive again!!! Accompanying this defective drive was one piece of defective media!!!! A paper sleeve with a CD-R that was severely scratched and which had been written on already (though the disk was unreadable. They probably wrote it with the drive they sent me...).

I'm telling you. Do not buy any products from these guys if you ever think you're going to have to deal with their RMA department and support. And chances are you will.

And you know the funny thing is I don't even need this drive. I have three other fully functioning CD-RW drives at home (BusLink & 2 Sony). At this point I am more interested to find out whether they are actually going to honor their warranty. And it makes for a good conversation topic when talking to friends.

It is amazing how big a difference good support makes. When it is there, it builds brand loyalty, when it is not, it makes you want to sit down and share it with the world so they will not have to go through the same pains.