Rating: 
Summary: A Total loser
Review: What I wanted was a burner to attach to my IBM Thinkpad to make CDs. What I got (purchased on the basis of positive reviews here) was an expensive piece of junk. Tried three different IEEE1364 cards to interface with this; nothing worked (except the computer recognized all three of the cards). Turn on the CD-RW drive and the computer crashes, with all three IEEEs. A complete wipeout: I could only re-start the computer by removing the connection AND the battery. I called Yamaha, finally (I really couldn't believe the problem was there), got a very helpful agent who gave me a Return Authorization number, sent the machine to Yamaha and waited. A quick turn-around(10 days), and I plugged the CD-RW in this morning and, once again, my computer crashed. The CD-RW drive is now sitting in my trash bin and it will be a long time before I buy a Yamaha product again. What a waste.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Burner
Review: What's not to like about this drive: It's firewire, it's fast, it's external and portable.On my Win2k system, when I plugged the drive in, my pc automatically recognized it as a cd-rom drive. The software/drivers loaded easily and I've been burning up a storm with it. I doesn't seem to rip quite as fast as advertised although one trick I've noticed is to make sure the drive is already spinning before you start ripping (this fakes out the variable spin technology). Since I've only has 12x media around I've only been able to burn at 12x but I was able to do this while online/surfing which is something I hadn't been able to do w/my old lame IDE CD/RW that I've replaced. As to be expected the software that ships with the unit is acceptable but not full featured. My only gripe is that power is not supplied through the firewire ports on the back of this drive which could make daisy chaining more of a challenge (depending on what hardware you have). All in all this was a great buy at a great price (much discounted over msrp + a manufacturers rebate).
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Burner
Review: What's not to like about this drive: It's firewire, it's fast, it's external and portable. On my Win2k system, when I plugged the drive in, my pc automatically recognized it as a cd-rom drive. The software/drivers loaded easily and I've been burning up a storm with it. I doesn't seem to rip quite as fast as advertised although one trick I've noticed is to make sure the drive is already spinning before you start ripping (this fakes out the variable spin technology). Since I've only has 12x media around I've only been able to burn at 12x but I was able to do this while online/surfing which is something I hadn't been able to do w/my old lame IDE CD/RW that I've replaced. As to be expected the software that ships with the unit is acceptable but not full featured. My only gripe is that power is not supplied through the firewire ports on the back of this drive which could make daisy chaining more of a challenge (depending on what hardware you have). All in all this was a great buy at a great price (much discounted over msrp + a manufacturers rebate).
Rating: 
Summary: Easy to Setup and Fast too!
Review: When I got this CD burner, I just took it out of the box, plugged it into my iBook (running Mac OS X 10.2), and burned my first CD with Toast. It burned it nice and fast: a full CD in a little over 4 minutes. The Buffer Underrun Protection feature that it comes with is a godsend. I can actually do other things on my computer while a CD is burning, instead of worrying about Toast always being the frontmost application and making sure that nothing is running in the background. A really great buy, .... I have found no flaws and would recommend this burner to anyone who asked.
| 
