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Rating: 
Summary: No problems on Win2k
Review: I use this on Win2K laptop from IBM, in conjunction with the Orange Micro FireWire PCMCIA card, a Maxtor 80G firewire drive, and the Iomega Zip250 firewire. It has worked great for me, no issues.
Rating:
Summary: No problems on Win2k
Review: I use this on Win2K laptop from IBM, in conjunction with the Orange Micro FireWire PCMCIA card, a Maxtor 80G firewire drive, and the Iomega Zip250 firewire. It has worked great for me, no issues.
Rating:
Summary: A truly excellent burner--highly recommended
Review: I've been running this burner for 6 months now on a Mac (OS9.2, G4 450) and it has performed flawlessly.
Setup is a breeze -- power the drive on and plug in the firewire cable. Toast recognises it, and it Just Works.
The 24 burn speed is awesome, and has to be seen to be believed (make sure you use media rated for that speed, though). I haven't burned a single coaster, whether at 2x (which I still think is best for backing up critical data) or 24x.
The other reason I would recommend this unit: quality. I've been running Yamaha CDR drives since about 1995-1996, and they all still work. My original 2x sits in a backup machine where it can work unattended, its speed not an issue. My brother uses my old 4x (which has to be about 5 yrs old now) and my wife uses my old 6x (which has to be about 3 or 4 yrs old) on her laptop, off a PCMCIA. Not a problem with any of them (and they're SCSI), even on my wife's PC. By contrast, I have an AOpen and an ACER in two of my PCs, and they act flaky every now and then, spitting out a coaster for no good reason, and acting up with CDRWs too.
This unit is firewire, but it seems to work even better than the SCSI ones. The case feels well-made and sturdy, and the tray action seems quality. The blue LED lights are nifty eye-candy and the front panel is logically laid out. The power supply isn't a brick, is interchangeable if (like me) you change continents, and doesn't get too hot. The burner comes packed very well in a sturdy box, and comes with some useful software if you aren't a power-user.
The only gripe is that the supplied firewire cable is a little short, but this isn't a problem if you sit it on top of a mini-tower. You may need to spring for a longer cable if you want to locate it somewhere else.
Overall, though, I love this unit and will buy another one. I did look at QPS before buying this one (as I have a DVDR from them which works great) but am glad I picked the Yamaha.
Rating:
Summary: A truly excellent burner--highly recommended
Review: I've been running this burner for 6 months now on a Mac (OS9.2, G4 450) and it has performed flawlessly.
Setup is a breeze -- power the drive on and plug in the firewire cable. Toast recognises it, and it Just Works.
The 24 burn speed is awesome, and has to be seen to be believed (make sure you use media rated for that speed, though). I haven't burned a single coaster, whether at 2x (which I still think is best for backing up critical data) or 24x.
The other reason I would recommend this unit: quality. I've been running Yamaha CDR drives since about 1995-1996, and they all still work. My original 2x sits in a backup machine where it can work unattended, its speed not an issue. My brother uses my old 4x (which has to be about 5 yrs old now) and my wife uses my old 6x (which has to be about 3 or 4 yrs old) on her laptop, off a PCMCIA. Not a problem with any of them (and they're SCSI), even on my wife's PC. By contrast, I have an AOpen and an ACER in two of my PCs, and they act flaky every now and then, spitting out a coaster for no good reason, and acting up with CDRWs too.
This unit is firewire, but it seems to work even better than the SCSI ones. The case feels well-made and sturdy, and the tray action seems quality. The blue LED lights are nifty eye-candy and the front panel is logically laid out. The power supply isn't a brick, is interchangeable if (like me) you change continents, and doesn't get too hot. The burner comes packed very well in a sturdy box, and comes with some useful software if you aren't a power-user.
The only gripe is that the supplied firewire cable is a little short, but this isn't a problem if you sit it on top of a mini-tower. You may need to spring for a longer cable if you want to locate it somewhere else.
Overall, though, I love this unit and will buy another one. I did look at QPS before buying this one (as I have a DVDR from them which works great) but am glad I picked the Yamaha.
Rating: 
Summary: Great intrinsic design and fast, but had scary problems
Review: It can be terrifying installing new hardware and drivers on a PC and it was for me with the Yamaha CRW3200FXZ, but the terror was short-lived and it seems to be behaving itself. I bought this drive because the specs seemed to be superior to drives that have even faster write rates (up to 40X -- this one is 24X). I'd heard that 24X drives can achieve writing a full 700 MByte disk in 5 minutes. Well this one does it in 4 and for that it is worth five stars for me, but a few nits and my "terrifying" experience with it cause me to downgrade it to four stars.First, the terrifying experience, caused by a bug in the driver. The enclosed Firewire cable that comes with the unit is a mere 27 inches long (pretty useless), so I had set it up on the floor (the only place it would reach the back of my PC). Then I cut 11 700 MByte disks (all different) without a hitch, and I was surprised and extremely delighted by the 4 minute burn time for each disk. My previous CD burner was SCSI and rated 12X yet it took a half hour to burn each disk (albeit on a slower machine). So I couldn't be happier about this speed, the very reason I bought this to begin with. Then I went out and bought a six foot Firewire cable and had to disconnect everything to re-position the unit. To my annoyance, the unit did NOT automatically reconnect like Firewire devices are supposed to. So I rebooted my machine without plugging in the Firewire cable and as soon as the CRW3200FXZ driver announced its presence, to my horror, Windows 2000 crashed with the infamous blue-screen! I rebooted twice more and got the same blue screen crash. Out of desperation, before my fourth attempt, I hooked up all cables and rebooted again. To my great relief, everything booted up properly and the unit was once again fully functional. Now I'm afraid to turn it off! But the driver packaged with my unit was obviously buggy, which is one reason I downgraded my rating from 5 to 4 stars. I haven't yet checked the Yamaha website to see if there is an update. A nit that I have with the packaging is the outrageously bright LED sitting on the front of the unit. You know those exceedingly bright LEDs that have been recently developed that they now put in headlamps and flashlights? Yamaha is using one of those on the front of their device! It's so bright when a disk is not in the unit (a bright violet) that you can't even look at it and it puts a purple glow in my entire bedroom at night! With a disk in place a not quite so bright (but still too bright) blue light emanates from that same LED. Yamaha should have used a standard LED, which is all you need. The burn software that comes with the Yamaha for free I like better than the best-selling commercial product. I have just two complaints. To start a new job, you have to go through a wizard every time which requires four quick clicks of the mouse to run through it. Fortunately it remembers all its settings from one execution to the next, so it is only a minor complaint. What is superior about this software is the progress status it gives while writing the disk: everything you would want and more. The only thing I don't like about it (besides the wizard) is that it doesn't give you the exact byte count on the main dialog when you prepare the job. You have to go fishing for it inside the menu system. I had one disk that was right on the border of 700 MBytes (according to the progress bar) but I decided to let it rip anyhow. After grinding away for four minutes, it gave me an error indicating that the disk was unwritable! So I tried again and got the same thing. I decided to test this one and saw that I could read everything on the disk. Apparently there wasn't enough room on the disk to write some terminating status or something. But the disk was good! So some minor complaints and a few minutes of terror. Other than that, the unit seems to be well designed (except get rid of the torch of an LED!) and it's blazing fast for its 24X rating.
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