Rating: 
Summary: Double Disappointment
Review: After reading all 45 customer reviews which were about 50/50 positive and negative; I decided to risk getting the Yamaha CRW2100EZ. I really wanted it to work, despite the warnings. My system is a Win 98 Pentium III, 550MHz processor, 128MB PC100 SDRAM, 18GB 7200rpm Ultra ATA Hard Drive. I was replacing a slower 2x2x4 CD-Rewritable Drive with the Yamaha. I confirmed that the jumper settings and the other connections were right and placed the same connections that were on my previous drive onto the Yamaha. Upon restarting my computer, my system's cmoss recognized the drive, but locked up on the Win 98 screen even after several attempts. I could only get free by pushing the reboot button. One call to the Service Tech and I was told I had a defective drive and to return it and they would send me a new one. I did this and the new one did the same thing. I sent it back for a refund and ordered the highly recommended Plextor 16/10/40A. I received it the next day, installed it just as I had done with the Yamaha with one exception... IT WORKED!!! Just the way it was advertised, just the way I had hoped the Yamaha would, BUT DIDN'T!!! I gladly join the chorus of wise ones and greatly encourage anyone wanting to purchase a top-of-the-line CD-rewritable drive to order the Plextor 16/10/40A. You will be sooo glad you did. I feel that maybe I got lucky that I didn't get any further with the Yamaha installation than I did. After all, there were those that did get further, at a great expense of time, money and heartbreak with what was left of their computers...
Rating: 
Summary: well, not so great for all of us
Review: well, I bought it very early on when it first came out. And I payed the price. Its not that it doesn;t work at all it works pretty good if you wanna settle for 8x burns, but thats not what i bought it for, i want the full scale 16. I do have a crappy hard drive so maybe thats my problem, so if you have a 5400 rpm hard drive get soething like plextor with burn proof. Also, reading cds seems extremely arduous for this drive. When you put in a cd, the whole system freezes for about 7 seconds as the drive lets out a screeching howl. Then if youre lucky it reads it like your average drive, if youre not it will keep on howling and read it like a 2x rom. Also, forget about that 40x rip speed. thats only if you wanna encode into wav files. With music match jukebox, (provided) youll get 9x max, and that is if it doesn;t freeze 2 seconds into the burn. so there you have it, you might be able to get it to work, if you spend 34593834 hours on it and rip out two sets of hair and break all of your china, but without doing that you'll probably be pretty upset, unless you wanna settle for the 8x burnung and 8x ripping which you could get for 5 times less. thank you for reading my rambling thoughts
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent burner
Review: I got mine some days ago - it works perfectly. The speed is quite impressive, and I've done all my burning at 16X without any problems. It's a bit loud when reading cd's but that's not why I got it. The buffer never went below 90% - I think a fast harddrive might be the key to other owner's problems.Noma.
Rating: 
Summary: It works great for me
Review: I bought the Yamaha 16-10-40 even after reading the bad reviews that some people gave it. Some people said that you need a supper computer to run this thing, and that it is terribly noisy. It does get louder than your average drive, but only when it is doing certain tasks. Other than that it has been perfect. I have a 2 year old pc with an intel celleron 400 processor and I have burned discs at x16 speed, plus I did not even have to upgrade any drivers, or firmware. I was burning my first cd within 30 minutes of opening the box.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbelievably noisy. Get TDK Velo istead!
Review: I've heard it a few times, yet each time it revs it's engine, the screeching sound coming from the Yamaha CRW2100EZ catches me by suprise! How could anyone put such a product out on the market ? I read the reviews about how noisy it is, but I thought they were probably exaggerations from disgruntled users. So I bought the drive anyway because of it's supposed speed. As a CDRW, I think the CRW2100EZ is average. I did not manage to record more than 8 speed, even after downloading the firmware update from Yamaha's website. My first time burning the cd led to buffer problems. I was using the cd-r disc that came with the drive. However, when I switched to a cd-rw disk by Imation, I successfully burned the cd, although at a disappointing speed given Yamaha's claim of the 2100EZ being a speed demon. The software that came with it, Adaptec's Easy CD Writer was excellent though, easy to use. And the documentation that came with the drive is one of the most complete and well-written manual I've ever come across. It also came with Neato's software and hardware for creating cd-labels. Given the drive's average burning ability yet deafening performance, I believe these far outweigh the software goodies that came with it. So the very next day, I went out to buy TDK's Velo 16x/10x/40x (same config as the 2100EZ) and I could've wept for joy!!!! Beautiful drive with a bluish semi-transparent look, it is a dream to operate. It burned at 16x as promised and Nero 5.0 was easy to use and very realiable. I burned 3 cds, each under 5 minutes and all 3 came out great! Get the Velo instead of the Yamaha CRW2100EZ, unless you want to break your window panes by it's screeching or by flinging the drive out the window.
Rating:
Summary: I'm in Heaven
Review: After buying a computer five years ago for $... that is obselete today I decided to buy a $... Compaq Presario. I added 128 megs of Ram and bought the Yamaha CRW2100EZ for a second CD and burner. To tell you the truth I was scared by the reviews! I also knew from past experience that most problems are encountered by installing things wrong. I followed everything by the book and it was a snap. The Yamaha cranks em' out like a champ without any errors. I think I will upgrade my other cd in the computer so it can give the Yamaha data faster when copying CD to CD. Please don't let the bad reviews scare you off. It's a great burner
Rating:
Summary: This Drive Is A Waste Of Time AND Money
Review: I bought One of these drives and after six calls to tech support they told me to take it back becuase it was defective, but since they have told me my problem is six different things I am having a hard time believing tech support. The problem I had they kept telling me should never happen on Win2K, hey guess what it was and they can't figure it out. Well I am taking it back and NOT getting another Yamaha.
Rating:
Summary: Unreliable from the beginning
Review: After having this drive for 3 months it must now be returned for service. The drive has been quirky from the beginning but rapidly became worse across the three months. What started out as annoying oddities became an inability to mount any disk. It will no longer read from or write to any disc. A very poor drive in my opinion. I wish I had bought something else.
Rating:
Summary: Works great!
Review: Installation took less than 20 minutes, and the first burn worked well. EIDE cord in the back came undone after the 1st burn but that was an easy problem to correct. 2 drawbacks...like everyone else has said, when reading cd's this burner is LOUD! Burning and playing music isn't really louder than normal. Last drawback is that when installing it in my Beige G3, the cd tray is just a fraction of a mm wider than the original Sony cd player. So I had to take off the face plate around the cd drive. Not a big thing, but didn't expect to have to do that. Otherwise, I'd recommend this product each and every time.
Rating:
Summary: Shirda, NY
Review: I got this item two weeks ago. Installing was pretty easy and it works perfectly. I burned a CD in 7 minutes. I have to agree it is loud, but it does the job.
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