Rating: 
Summary: Great CD-RW under a no name brand
Review: Note: This review is for the 8x8x32x version. Don't be fooled in thinking this CD-RW is from a no name brand. The CD-RW you will be getting will either be a Ricoh or a TEAC (I got the TEAC), which are both very respectable brand names. Cendyne just manufactures the package and puts their name on the drive. The burning software included, Nero Burning-ROM, is a great package with more features than Adaptec, but is aimed at more advanced users. I found the wizards in Nero to be easy to use and very helpful. This drive only takes about 15-20 minutes to install and I found burning a full audio CD to take just under 10 minutes...pretty quick for an 8x burner. I would recommend this product to anybody who needs a reliable burner that will get the job done in a respectable time.
Rating:
Summary: Great Deal
Review: I too was lucky to be upgraded to a 8x8x32 unit. This sure seems to be a quality burner, well made, solid, and easy to install (mine is a Teac CDW58E under CenDyne clothing!). Nothing about it is flimsy. I've done about 15 cd's now & none were bad; mostly audio. I did however get good CD-R's to start with, TDK to insure successful burning. Just check the list of recommended blanks to use in the manual. I like the NERO software a lot, & I read most of the info that came with it to begin with-about 50 or so pages. Kind of mind numbing. But it is helpful. There's a lot of versitility to NERO, which is cool. I also got the latest Adaptec software (then updated online to v4.03) to compare to NERO. The adaptec works fine, no conflicts. It's easy to use, but it seems simpler than NERO, kind of stripped down. Doesn't have all the features of NERO-ow I forgot, they want you to buy the deluxe version with more features. I don't think so! NERO works great, wish I hadn't bought adaptec. The audio cd's sound virtually identical to original, however I will now burn certain ones at 4x such as older analog & lesser quality recordings. Otherwise they're perfect. I also save the music to hard disk as wav's-then burn them; this lets error correction happen before you burn it to cd. Only thing is it takes up a lot of hard disk space this way. NERO has some sound adjustments you can make to music cd's, hiss reduction-EQ etc. which is great. My burner was manufactured in NOV this year, so it's REAL new, if yours is a Teac also you can look it up on their site. This is a quality burner & I couldn't be happier
Rating: 
Summary: Great Product. Where's my rebate, Cendyne?
Review: We bought this one because of the great value, figuring in a Manufacturer's rebate from Cendyne. We'll it's been years, and after constant phone calls and emails we've received nothing but promises that it "will go out in tomorrow's mail." Other than the lie of a rebate to falsely lower the price we've been very pleased with this burner, and actually they shipped a free upgrade (8x12x52 CD-RW drive) as this model was out of stock. Really good product (4 stars) , dubious marketing (-2 stars).
Rating: 
Summary: Reliability problems - get what you pay for.
Review: This is basically a Ricoh drive. I used to have a 1x Ricoh drive a long time ago and it croaked after a year of very light use. Recently I bought this model to replace my dead 4x Yamaha (which also died in 1 year of light use). It was going for ....($$) at amazon after rebate so I figured I would try it... Well it's been a few months and already the drive is giving me no end of problems. Putting in CD-R media makes the drive vibrate violently, I can feel it even vibrating my desk. About 3/4 of the time the drive just gives me some random error (with the provided Nero software) and I have to keep ejecting/inserting the CD-R until it works. Yes I've also upgraded the firmware to 1.9, no help there. It will tide you over for a few months but don't expect it to last too long, if my experience with Ricoh/Cendyne is any indication.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent CDRW for the money, works like a charm .....
Review: Initially I was skeptical about buying this drive (Manufacturer? Price? Bundled Software?), however for the money I figured you can't go far wrong! I used the drive to back-up my old system before installing it into my new system (both running Windows 98SE) and it worked immediately in both instances.The NERO software that comes with the drive works well although it has at least one 'quirky' issue with the GUI when building directory trees for a data CD. Other than this minor issue I have not seen anything worthy of complaint. I did also try the Adaptec EasyCD software (requires 4.02e update from Adaptec's web site) and it worked well initially. I ran into some problems (maybe due to coexistence with NERO?) and reverted to the NERO software as I saw no major reason to change anyway! The drive tray sounds a little 'under-powered' and worries me that one day I will push the eject button and it will not come out - other than this the mechanics seem good. If you want a CDRW and you are on a budget, here's your best chance this side of Christmas!
Rating:
Summary: Best Bang For Your Buck
Review: Without question, this is the best deal you're going to find this holiday season on a CDR/W. First of all, don't let the fact that you're not familiar with the name CenDyne fool you; this IS a Ricoh 7063A, a very widely supported model and respected manufacturer. I worked in tech support for another CDR manufacturer, and Ricoh is one of the few brands I'll put in my own machine at home. As for reviewer Bob who gives this wonderful drive a measly 2 stars because it doesn't work with his Adaptec software; you need to update your software. For those of you who have Easy CD Creator 4.0, get the free update to 4.02 from Adaptec's website - this drive has been supported by it for nearly a year now. But who cares? Nero blows it out of the water, and is provided for free. Faster, smaller, and quite simply better. Other software I'm using with this drive: Audiograbber, CloneCD (lets you make an exact copy of any CD, even with copy protection), INCD, Golden Hawk and FireBurner. It takes about 11 minutes to burn a 700meg/80min CDR to capacity. I've almost went through a spindle of blanks in the 2 weeks I've had this drive, and have yet to burn a coaster. Tip: This drive ships with v1.50 of it's firmware; I would suggest getting the newest (v1.80 at the time of this writing) from CenDyne's website and flashing the unit to nip any compatibility problems in the bud first thing. All in all, a wonderful drive for the price, I can't recommend it enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Wasn't compatable with my computer.
Review: Sorry, but I can't say anything good about this cd writer.
I had to send it back cause it was not compatable and wouldn't work. I have no idea why.
Rating:
Summary: Not a product for the novice especially with recent advances
Review: This is one of 2 bad purchases that I have made over the internet out of close to 100 transactions. If you are going to purchase something of this nature I would suggest you know the product and it's reliability very well or purchase from a local outlet with good tech support. After repeated attempts to get this product to work, I was told that a mailer was being sent to send it back in. Unfortunately one never arrived. Chastising myself thinking it might be operator error I kept working with it, researching, upgrading computer and components but still getting buffer under runs. A friend who is very good with computers finally made it work, but sporadically at best. Even doing test first and then burn I made a lot of coasters. I wish that I would have been able to have mailed it back and got my money back as originally offered. Thank you for that kind gesture. A little more follow through would have been awesome. My current burner by Lite On is awesome and I would highly recommend. Oh I almost forgot to mention when speaking to Cendyne they were the one's that offered this. TEAC the actually manufacturer just bounces you back to Cendyne stating not their problem as it was specifically manufactured for them. Amazon is reputable from what I've seen but this product stinks. The TDK discs I bought in conjuncion were a great value and I'm still using. I would strongly suggest you research the issue of Buffer Under Runs and buy a current product that supports "Burn Proof" or similar wording, or at least know what you are up against. Mine may have been defective as there have been some great reviews on this unit but this is not one of them.
Rating:
Summary: You can't go wrong for the price
Review: For that price you can't go wrong. I bought a 8x burner a couple months ago for over double the price and wish i didn't Great for someone who just wants to make a few music cds or back up your system. If you think you will be burning very frequently i would strongly recommend spending a few more bucks and getting a 10x,12x or higher. But if not go for it. It works great.
Rating:
Summary: Great product
Review: I've had my CDRW for about 6 months now and it has worked flawlessly. The only hitch I had was when I originally installed it; I had to download the newest firmware and update the drive before it would be recognized correctly by my system when installed with another IDE drive. I just installed it on it's own, updated the firmware, and reinstalled my other drive. Since then it's been great, and the Nero software is very good.
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