Ok I got my imac dv about two weeks ago and I have been dying to burn CD's but I know almost nothing about how to choose a good one, I try to read other topics and all I hear about is how slow the usb burners are and how many problems the new firewire drives are. Does anyone have any recommendations, all I want to do is to be able to make my own mixes, I would prefer a good speed, but even more than that I would like a reliable machine if possible under $350

Try the new QPS Que drive. It is a CDRW that runs around $260. Warning: Do not load Firmware updater because it made my friends iMac crash numerous times and he had to reload the system software to correct the problem. Also, do not start the computer with the CD burner pluged into your system at start up, causes it to freeze. The burner has been very reliable for my friends iMac and it burns at 4x. (example: He burned 250MB in approx. 5 min.)

unfortunately, when burning cds, you cannot get your cake and eat it too. you must sacrifice speed for no-hassle burns. for your price range i would suggest a usb burner, there are many out there, some good, some bad. i was drooling over a QUE! drive after macworld in new york, and when i finally got one, i was as happy as a duck in a pond. it's a good, solid burner, it matches my lime beauty, and if you don't go ape crazy, it'll produce good cd's. i use it to back-up, make my own mixes, and play mp3's in the car. yeah, hope this helps.

I recently got the Que m'self (tho' still waiting for the Grape color inserts). I like it lots. Tho' make sure you set the write speed for audio CDs to 2x instead of 4x... found that one out the hard way. Tho' I suppose I should've RTFM first.

A bit of warning, tho'... someone I was talking to got a Que USB several months ago. After a few weeks it just stopped working. He tried it on several iMacs and G3s and got the same problem. He sent it into the manufacturer, who said there was nothing wrong with it, so tough noogies.

So fill out that warranty registration card.

-P7

I've been quite happy with my LaCie UDB CDRW. It writes data and audio CDs at 4x, and on my iMac DV it can make direct CD-CD copies using the iMac's DVD drive -very cool. It works great with Toast. The only snag has been that in order for it to work well I have to connect it directly to the iMac (instead of to a hub with other drives, etc.). Otherwise it's trouble-free.

thanks for the info, do these writers come with good software, that isn't terribly problematic or will I need to buy third party softwareto get good CD's and if so what should I get? thanks a lot again

[MAlan]

Check out this forum.
http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/Forum5/HTML/000876.html

I bought a firewire CD rw from EZQuest for my new iMac DV/SE. It works great. It was $395 from Smalldog electronics. I didn't want the USB CD writers because of the inherent problem USB has with writing at higher speeds...i.e. the USB bandwidth is taken up during writing.

"the inherent problem USB has with writing at higher speeds...i.e. the USB bandwidth is taken up during writing." would you recommend against a usb burner because it is too slow and has problems or you prefer a firewire burner because of the speed?

[MAlan]

I read a review on MacNN about the Que! USB cd writer. It was generally a positive review but when burning at the higher speeds,4x as opposed to 2x I believe, the device failed to properly burn CD's one time out of 5 thereby rendering those media useless. They didn't do nearly enough writing to suggest that absolutely 20% of the media you use will be lost when burning at 4x. However, they did mention that all USB CD writers will hit the fundamental limitation of the USB bandwidth being completely used during writing thereby causing the device to burn unusable media.

Now for the alternate view many reader's have chimed in and said that their USB CD writer...even the Que! is great and they love it. One guy I distinctly remember said that he always burns at 2X and has never had a single problem. He said the problem people have is being to "greedy" and going for more speed.

In my final analysis I believe that the USB cd writers are suitable for writing at 2X. If you don't mind burning CD's at 2x then your fine. I chose the firewire technology for the following reasons:

The firewire architecture is fundamentally a better way of connecting peripherals than USB...so is SCSI by the way and SCSI is slower. SCSI is a 10 Mb/s port (SCSI 2 is 80 but lets not get into that). USB is 12 Mb/s. Every SCSI cd writer that I've heard other people talk about has been held in high regard....i.e. it almost never burns an unusable disk and they have SCSI CD writers at 4x, 6x and probably even faster than that by now. So why are the USB products failing in this capacity? It comes down to a data flow architecture issue that I must confess I don't know everything about. But what I do know is that USB is an INTEL technology that is a privately held technology. Firewire on the other hand is a technology that has the backing of the IEEE organization. It must meet certain specifications to get that kind of backing. Therefore I trust the technology more since it is in the public trust.

Now a USB CD writer costs about $300. The firewire one I bought was $400. When your talking about bang for your buck the firewire burners win. Here is my argument for that. Lets assume for a minute that you'll burn every disk with your USB cd writer at 2x so that you eliminate practically all possibility of burning unusable media. Let's also assume that at 6x the firewire burner that I bought is 99% reliable (which I don't know if that is the case or not but the one disk I burned at 6x turned out fine).

Under that assumption then the usb writer is a $150/unit of speed value where the firewire cd writer is a $67/unit of speed value.

I hope this helped!

[MAlan]

Also check this topic out it might help you make your decision.
http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/Forum4/HTML/000312.html

Actually SCSI is much faster than USB, and some forms of SCSI are faster than fire wire. SCSI is normally spec'd with megabytes (MB) the others in megabits (Mb).
I was going to look all the numbers up when I came across this post from tooki:
Actually, as you mentioned, FireWire is supposed to be taken to 800Mbps, but there is a 1600Mbps version in the
works, and I suspect it will be released instead of 800Mbps FireWire.

to answer the original question:


current FireWire: 50MBps = 400Mbps

SCSI : 5MBps
Fast SCSI: 10Mbps
Fast Wide SCSI: 20MBps
Ultra SCSI: 20Mbps
Ultra Wide SCSI: 40MBps
Ultra2 Wide SCSI: 80MBps
Ultra2 Wide LVD SCSI: 160Mbps

and for posterity:
USB: 1.5MBps = 12Mbps

10BaseT ethernet: 1.25MBps = 10Mbps
100BaseTX ethernet: 12.5MBps = 100Mbps


tooki

You can find the original post and thread at: http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/Forum4/HTML/000263.html

[This message has been edited by PolarWave (edited 12-10-1999).]