Rating: 
Summary: Pure LOVE
Review: BUY IT GUYS< DONT EVEN THINK< JUST GET IT!!(...) IM AMAZED>(...) BY ITS SHEER SPEED
Rating: 
Summary: Works great, but *so* loud
Review: I've had this drive installed for about a week and give it a strong three stars. On my computer (PIII 500, 368Mb RAM, Win98SE) using Media Jukebox I've had no problem burning error free CD's. With this setup the drive pretty much works as advertised, burning at 16x with no buffer problems (I bought it because of the decent on board buffer). BUT, be prepared, because this is the noisiest drive I've ever heard. I ripped a CD from the drive (which is in a tower case on a carpeted floor) and during the process I was treated to significant vibration on my desk (about two feet away) and a noise that brought my wife up from downstairs with a very worried look on her face. Loose CD's on top of the tower started to move around and fall off. Really, it was almost comical. However, the drive is mostly silent during burns, so I'm keeping it for trouble free burns and using my other drive (an Hitachi DVD) for all other CD read needs.
Rating: 
Summary: Worked well for first few months
Review: My CRW2100E drive worked pretty well for first few months. On around the 7th month, I started to experience some problems...the drive would not read/write CD's occassionaly. On the 8th month, the it failed completely. I do not burn alot of CD's. I burned around 80 CD's only during the lifespan of that drive. In the end, found out that the problem was with the laser unit of the drive....which was probably caused by the drive not being well-balanced. I would not recommend this drive to a friend.
Rating:
Summary: worried about reviews, but LOVE IT
Review: I read the mixed reviews about this burner, but thought for the price... how could I go wrong. I LOVE IT. it does everything it promises and more... great deal, great product... only drawback is the included software.. worthless to me, I use Nero.... but since I already had it from my last burner... not a big deal.
Rating:
Summary: Works great
Review: I read all of the negative reviews before buying this. I was hesitant, but for (price) after rabate and free shipping, what did I have to lose.
The drive installed without a hitch. The bios/OS recognized the drive immediately. The drive shipped with the newest firmware revision I must add. I must say I was pleasently surprised. I was expecting the worst. I have a crudball PII running an EIDE hardrive with 17ms access time and a slow transfer rate. We're talking PIO4, this is the days before ATA anything! I was expecting that I would have to burn at 8x or so. Not the case. This drive worked at 16x without a hitch. No coasters! And the buffer was consistently at 90%+. No sign of bottoming out. I don't know what the deal is with folks having problems. I wonder if it isn't user error!?!?!?!
I did run into one problem with the included Adaptec program. It did not recognize blank discs in the drive. Luckily, Easy CD Creator includes an instant updater which works over the web. Once I downloaded the most recent version of Easy CD Creater, all bugs were gone. For free software with a (price) drive, I can handle 5 minutes of download time to get things going.
As far as noise from the drive, it is no louder than any other 32x+ I have ever encountered. (As a tech for over 12 years, I have seen some junk!) Sure, you can buy other brands that are a wee bit softer, but I don't think (price range) warrants 6db difference in noise.
This drive really shines when it comes to DAE. If you plan to rip CD's to make your own mixes or what have you, this drive flys!
Any negative reviews seem to be the result of folks just plain not reading the instructions or having no idea how CD ROM's work with the other components in the system. The processor has little to do with it and RAM is in the same boat. Just be sure DMA is turned on (both for your CDRW and the hard disk) and that you have your fastest hard disk as the master on it's controller and is using correct cabling. (ATA66 drives etc require special 80 wire cables. If you use just any cable, the drive will go back to old school IDE transfer rates.) As long as everything is configured correctly, you should have no problems. Also, if you have two controllers, put the CDRW as the master on controller 2. These rules apply to any ATAPI (translated as non-SCSI) CDRW.
Great drive, I would recommend it to anyone. Just please, be sure you know how to install IDE devices and get the patch from Adaptec. If you can handle 10 extra minutes of effort, you can save yourself a lot of money and get wonderful results with this drive.
Quick note: When CD-ROM/RW's are rated for speed, the company uses the max speed possible to advertise the drive. Most (99.99999%) of manufacturers do this. Many people get a drive home and are disappointed when they run a bench mark program and it tells them that the AVERAGE transfer of their drive is 20x or what have you. 40x is only obtainable at the outermost regions of a disc. That's because more surface is passing the laser than on the inner part of the disc in one revolution. Don't get bent out of shape because of this. It's just the way things work and how drive manufacturers have chosen to advertise their drives.
Rating: 
Summary: Not recommended
Review: As many others have noted, this drive is extremely noisy, not very well balanced, and mine failed 1 week after the warranty expired. I would not recommend this drive.
Rating:
Summary: Get burned with this product
Review: Bought it without reading the reviews, then looked to the reviews for help from all the other people with problems.
This product is the loudest drive while spinning. It is due to poor construction being that most of the noise comes from the unit rattleing its plastic parts around. First, the drive never even came close to the speeds that it is supposed to read or write. Out of the 15 disks I burned, only 3 came out complete with no problems. They were the first 3 I tried. Some had a terrible static type noise during the first 10 sec of each song. Then the cd-rw started to lock up my system, then it started to lock out my existing cd-rom. I downloaded the updates from the website, then it started to crash my windows system. Fixed that then started to have a buffer problem with every attempt at burning. I went over everything with the customer support phone person, for a total of 5 hours. Still no sollutions for my problem. They blame the software (adaptec easy cd 4). Funny, I returned it, got a phillips burner with the same software and it works fine. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY ON THIS UNIT. THERE ARE MANY OTHER FASTER AND LESS EXPENSIVE ONES OUT THERE. TRUST ME, I AM ON MY THIRD BRAND. I am running win 98
pentium 850 with 256 meg of ram. I have very few programs running, and have 85% of my resourses free when burning a cd. It is not my computer causing the problems. Hope this helps in your purchasing decision.
Rating:
Summary: It's great for what I need to do!!!!!
Review: I'm a DJ and I download music all the time. This CD writer works great for what I need to do. Make sure that you buy a CD writer with a good buffer system. The one that I have has 8 MB which eliminates a lot of mistakes. It is a great product and fast too.
Rating:
Summary: I do not like this CDRW.
Review: ... Using a Celeron 700 and it takes 15 minutes to burn an audio CD. I have to use 8x because errors pop up at higher speeds. Also, it is very loud. I recommend a Plextor 12x plexwriter. It is a lot faster and quieter. It took only 6 minutes to burn an audio cd at 12x with a Celeron 366.
Rating:
Summary: Average CDRW at a resonable price
Review: I was shopping around for an internal cdrw with many known brands in consideration. After reading the review here and taking the current huge $... rebate into account, I finally decided to buy this product. At first, not to mention the huge noise coming from the drive and it sometimes makes me feel like something is not right. Sometimes the copying works with no problems but sometimes it doesn't. Then when I restart my pc and try again, then it works. Sometimes it just gives me strange error when my original and recordable media have no problem at all. But about 80% of the times it makes a good copy. So at around $... after rebate, it's still a good deal.
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