Rating: 
Summary: Quality Product
Review: Well, after reading all the reviews that were here, and there were a lot of negative and a lot of positive reviews, i decided to give it a shot, plus 30 dollars rebate hook my attention finally.So, thanks to amazon.com, i received the product pretty fast. And i was ready to install it. Installation process was piece of cake: just connecting everything and that's it. My system: Pentium 3 450, 128 MB, 2 HDs - one IBM 10GB , second WD - 500 MB, and DVD Player, so i had just a one spot left for IDE. My Motherboard is ABIT BX. Windows 2000 Pro found it without any problems, there wasn't even a need to install any drivers. Since i had NERO Burning Rom, i decided not to install all the soft provided with this product(maybe some day i'll give it a shot, but i'm satisfied completely with NERO). So, i was able to make my first AUDIO CD in less then 5 minutes on 12 speed. On 16 - it's a little bit noisy, but still ok. Well, i already wrote several Audio cds and DATA cds, as well i tried copying from one cd to another. Everything is working smoothly as it supposed to be. Product is great. Thanks AMAZON.COM _ Thanks YAMAHA _ Thanks NERO
Rating:
Summary: Be Wary...
Review: ...you can only write as fast as you can read from the original CD. While this is true, it doesn't tell the whole story. If you are writing directly from your hard drive, you can burn at the full 16x. I think of the ability to do CD to CD copying as a bonus. ...a 'bad media' error. This really doesn't sound like a problem with the drive. Three things to check 1. do you have a CD in the drive when booting? If so, remove it and try again. 2. change your BIOS so it's not trying to boot from the CDROM, and try again. 3. make sure your master/slave setup is correct. You probably want the CD drive to be a slave to your primary hard drive, but not necessarily. If it's the only drive on the cable, you can make it the master. Reboot and try again. The odds of two of these drives being bad are pretty slim. All in all, I've found the Yamaha to be a quick and reliable drive, but for my money, I'd go with an Aopen 1232a... It burns at 12x, and it has JustLink, which is as good, if not better than BurnProof.
Rating: 
Summary: Get Yamaha if you feel the need for speed (and quality)!
Review: I installed this burner in a Dell Dimension with no problems. It now fills the slot where my DVD drive used to be. I was using the DVD so rarely that replacing it with a CD burner seemed much more practical. I also needed the ability to play CD-R's on my machine, which the Yamaha does beautifully. I also own an external SCSI Yamaha CD burner which has been connected to my Mac. Installation was very easy and took fifteen minutes. The only drawback I've seen so far is that the unit gets somewhat noisy, like a small jet engine, when it goes into high-speed mode. I think this is fairly typical for high-speed drives and it's only worth a minor mention. My bundle also came with the Neato CD Labeler software and some labels. Although I haven't used this product yet, I look forward to comparing it to the other CD labeler products (CD Stomper, Memorex) I've used previously.
UPDATE 9/19/01: I spent three hours last night trying to burn a CD for a friend using the 2100EZ with Easy CD Creator 4.05. I finally created my first coaster! I keep getting "buffer underrun" messages, which according to Yamaha, shouldn't happen with this model. Unfortunately, one solution is to slow down the recording speed, which kind of defeats the purpose of upgrading to a faster burner now, doesn't it? I need to do some tweaking, as I'm not sure if its the hardware or the software. All I know is that I had no problems with my previous CD-R software and am now questioning whether this was really an upgrade or not.
Rating:
Summary: Very FAST and reliable!
Review: This product is exactly as it is advertised. I've purchased this cd writer during December 2000. I did not want to write any type of review on it till I made the necessary tests. Honestly, you can burn data in about 5 minutes or less. I use the Fuji 16X compatible cd's and they all worked fine. Audio CD's are ripped extremely fast, but you need to download their software online. So far when backing up any data files including mp3 files, you can do it within the 5 minutes. The drive isn't perfect. The 8 megabyte buffer was great in minimizing or eliminating most cases of buffer underruns. I have made over 200 cd's with 2 cd becoming coasters. The coaster was done by burning MP3 into audio format at 16X. It works fine at 8X. I tested it at 12X and it wasn't successful so I did not attempt to burn the cd. Wave files into audio files was succesful even at 12-16X. The other coaster was created when I tried to do a cd to cd copy. It failed at 16X. 4-8X works fine. This probably happen because my cdrom drive reading speed is 20x or 24x. I don't know exactly why, but it does work but at lower speed for this type of burning. You'll probably be better off with a SCSI drive if you intend to do cd to cd copying as it isn't as CPU intensive like IDE, otherwise you can save some money and get this one for almost $100 cheaper. Installation was simple. I would suggest you also download the latest firmware if your drive doesn't have it already. I have a Pentium 2/350 with 512meg ram. I have owned and tried a few other cd writers and by far this is the most reliable and fastest one I've seen to date. (HP, Ricoh, Plextor (without the burn proof ones), etc.) I have to give it 5 stars because of the time it saves me in burning CD's and with very few coasters created.
Rating:
Summary: Great, but not the best!
Review: This rewriter is very good in terms of for your basic CD copying and so on. It says it offers buffer underrun protection with 8MB of memory but if you do a copying directly from disc-to-disc, you would still get buffer underrun error. I had some failed copying due to this error. The best way I found to be successfully making copies would be to copy to harddrive first then copy to your blank disc. This way has proven no problem to me so far, although it takes longer to do it. This device does sound very loud but it shouldn't be a big problem if you don't mind it. It's all-around above average rewriter and it's good for its price. The new ones with faster speed should be a good buy with decent price.
Rating: 
Summary: YAMAHA ISN'T ONLY BRAND WITH THE FASTEST!!!!
Review: Read all the reviews and decided we could make it work on our system without major upgrades-- PII, 350mghz, 64 RAM, Win98. From the completion of the install, we could only record data. Every time a disk went in, the system froze. This was copying from a cd, from the harddrive, etc. Spent a minimum of 16 hours on the phone with tech support to no avail. One tech rep had me blow out my video card (sixth call). We upped our RAM to 256. We had the same issues. From what we we reading, we figured upgrading to WinME would solve the problem, but quite frankly, we don't want to go with WinME right now, nor should we have to for this to work! I don't think the problem is the drive, it is the software. Our problem with that is no other software is offered to support the drive, tech support is not aware of this compatibility problem, and the minimum requirements are not correct. We returned the Yamaha 2100ez a week after purchase and snagged a Plextor 16x10x40x! Exquisitely perfect from the moment of install!! We use the Plextor software because CDCreator 4 did not work with this drive either but at least they offered more options. AND IT WAS CHEAPER!! GET THE PLEXTOR, it's much quieter also!
Rating: 
Summary: Avoid this one
Review: This product is plagued with problems. The very loud sound is the least of it's problems. I have Win2K. Using the drive just to play CDs freezes the system for several seconds any time you insert a new CD.
The CD burning software is very flaky. It has lots of bugs and does not recover well from abnormal shutdowns. Have to reinstall it. Occasionally, while buring a CD the whole system crashes halfway through the process.
Rating:
Summary: Would be a 5 star drive except...
Review: IT'S TOO FREAKIN' LOUD! Try using software that requires a CD to run and this drive will drive you up a wall. I almost filed an extension when using TurboTax so I could go get a new drive.
Rating:
Summary: a loud coaster maker
Review: This drive is extremely loud, especially when accessing files, but even when playing back music--very irritating if your listening to a quiet classical music passage. This drive also takes a long time to access data, during which time it locks up my computer. I've also had a lot of issues with the bundled EZCD Creator software--many cases where the software would misread blank CDRs as full, preventing me from using them. I just purchased the Plextor plexwriter 24/10/40A CDRW from Amazon (for another computer), and I'm much happier. I find the plexwriter to be smooth, quiet, very fast, and reliable.
Rating:
Summary: There are better drives out there (plexstor)
Review: I've had mine for about 6 months. 1. Use Ahead Nero to burn all media. (most important) Copy from Morpheus for free, if it works buy the product. I think it is the best cd burner software out there by far. Easy Cd Creator works poorly. Easy CD also won't (always) correctly recognize the full capacity of the CD or that a new cd is writeable. 2. Find a CD media that is cheap and will work in your player. The expensive Verbatim media didn't work well on a GM deck-alot of skipping. (My parents have a cheap digital research drive and my GM deck never skips on those cdr's even on the cheapest media types.) This cdr skipping doesn't happen on all car decks and regular cd albulms work just fine. Sony cdr media worked much better than Verbatim. Don't buy a 50 pack of media and thing it will work-try a few singles first. 3. For home use all cdr media worked fine. (no skipping) 4. Use Ahead Nero to burn all media (see number #1) 5. I know that the packaging is flashy, but I would look at different (and cheaper) drives that burn on the cheapest media and skip the least in your car. Take your friends burned cd's and try them out to see if them work under the conditions that you work in. Buy what works best, Plexstor is probably the best, but will cost just a bit more? Don't buy a cd writer based on speed alone. You want quality 8x speed (15 min) is probably just fine. Do you really need to burn a CD in less that 5 minutes? 6. I expected better quality from Yahama. I expect that this drive will be giving me more problems in the future. But with Nero it works perfectly well for now. I'm still looking for the best media to burn on with out skipping on my GM car deck. 7. I hoped this helped some people with their problems. I use Windows 95,98,NT 4.0,2000,and XP Pro, Red Hat Linux, Mandrake 8.0, SuSe, HP A/UX, and MAC and have had no bios identity problems with the drive.
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