Rating: 
Summary: Attractive and Portable, But be WARNED....
Review: This drive is cheap, portable, interesting looking, and does the job...barely. I bought one used on ebay to take to a job site and do backups on a laptop. My mistake was not reading reviews on this drive and not knowing its limitations. I have encountered nearly every problem listed on other reviews, plus a few new ones. Do not even bother using the drive to write at higher speeds you will only make coasters. Also, forget about CD-RW! I have tried at the lowest speeds and I cannot even tell you how many times I have corrupted the file system of the disk in one way or another. I have to do data retreval on one disk I was stupid enough to 'Move' files to. Worked fine...but when I went to view the files the laptop hung...forever - after it was rebooted the CD-RW was corrupted. Files were still there but need to be recovered. Basically, write at 2x onto CD-R's. Burn a few and unplug the drive because it WILL get hot like others have said.
Rating:
Summary: Quite a bit of of a learning curve
Review: Spent two evenings with Iomega tech staff modifying software. fairly slow copier.
Rating: 
Summary: Listen to the other guy--don't leave plugged in
Review: Like others, I had trouble after a couple of weeks of owning this drive. I have more coasters than anyone else in the company. I went through three very unhelpful chats with Iomega. Iomega was ridiculously bad help, two of the support staff wanted me to have no other processes running as I tried to burn a CD at 2x. Next to impossible on a Windows machine, and unacceptable to me to have to close everything just to copy some files to a CD. But, on the advice of another review here, I leave the drive unplugged when I'm not using it. It has worked flawlessly when I plug it in for each use. The drive is very portable, so I can hook it up to my laptop as well. Three stars, because of the extra stp to plug it in.
Rating: 
Summary: Made Cheaply, Works Poorly
Review: This is a poorly made product and has been nothing but a headache. As another reviewer indicated, I made a lot of coasters.
Rating: 
Summary: Works great....but you need to do a few things first.
Review: I have had this for about 2 weeks and was a little skeptical about buying it because of the mixed reviews I read and went for it anyway. My reaons for buying this were that, I am a university stundent, travel a lot, and needed a portable cd-rw to back up work and the like. As far as my hardware, I have a Toshiba laptop running on XP home edition, with a celeron 1.06mhz. and Easy cd creator 5.0 platinum.
I'l just cut to it and get to the bottom line. DO NOT LEAVE THIS CD-RW PLUGGED IN TO THE POWER SOURCE unless you are going to use it for burning. This contraption does not have a bulit fan, and ultimately since you are using an, "optical laser device" it gets very hot after use. Here is the key: when the power is not taken offline, the circuitry within the player tends to stay active and thus the player remains very hot which effects overall burning capability. If you leave it unplugged until use, you will find this hardware very handy.
Needless to say, it took a little bit of trial and error but in the end, patience paid off and this little cd-rw really does the job. It is not the fastest thing in the world but for a USB 1.1 it does the job splendidly.
Rating:
Summary: Stay Away!
Review: I also found the tech support nice, but it has never worked consistantly. Tons of coasters!
Rating: 
Summary: Very Nice CD-RW!
Review: I had this cd-rw for more than 6 months, and I have no problem with it at all. Plus, it's most beautiful cd-rw I have ever seen.
Rating:
Summary: A very shoddy product package
Review: I was looking for offline storage I could hang off my laptop and spotted these recently and decided to purchase one. (doh!)
The first half-dozen disks seemed to write OK but then I (stupidly) applied the recommended firmware patch on the Iomega website as this was supposed to improve reliability over a wider range of disk brands. Since then (co-incidence maybe) it has had problems writing disks when copying from hard drive to CDRW. Explorer says it can't open the destination file, drive not ready etc. Searching the web shows this to be a common problem with the supplied DirectCD software. So far emails to Iomega support have been a total waste of time. Either they are swamped with support calls, know the product is useless or are simply not competent to fix it. * * * WARNING - DO NOT UPGRADE FIRMWARE TO VERSION 2.0 IF YOU SUSPECT YOU MAY WANT TO REVERT IT. * * * Iomega support say that the firmware cannot be reverted back to the original version once flashed. Firmware reverts are "not supported". Knowing how flash updates work I suspect either this is because they don't have a patch available or don't know what they are talking about. * * * DO NOT BUY THIS DRIVE IF YOU WANT TO COPY FILES OVER A NETWORK TO DIRECTCD * * Iomega support say that copying files over a LAN to directCD is "not supported". If you think that your disks are writing ok then beware. Run scandisc [sic] on the disk and check for errors. You may see lots of corrupted files like this ... File Structure Status:
File Path: 'E:\_Source_Code_Backups\Form1.frm'
Error: The ICB is corrupted or not accessible. ... as well as not being able to access the files. Do any testing with CDRW media unless you actually need coasters. Be aware that the power supply unit also seems to be under-specced and overheats considerably after a few hours. The unit makes loud "gronching" noises periodically. To be fair to Iomega I think that part of the problem may be due to Adaptec (Roxio) DirectCD which I am using. However, from the emails sent to me by Iomega - they are suggesting that to get support from Roxio I will have to purchase the "full" version of DirectCD or not be supported. This suggests that Roxio have washed their hands of the product. I honestly can't recommend that anyone buy this product who wants to use it for serious use. Look for something else. Sigh! - looks like another product destined for the skip!
Rating:
Summary: Bought it in August 2001, loved it.... Then stuff happens.
Review: I bought the Predator August of last year (2001). I loved the product. I had nothing but praises.. until now (May 2002). The device stopped working on me instantly out of nowhere. It wouldn't read the recommended CD brands. It wouldn't work on my friend's laptop. And it would spin at a low speed at its own desire. Iomega tech support people were very nice, yet very clueless also. I don't know what to do with this extra piece of plastic laying around the house now. ... It's really a no-wonder why the price of this device shot down dramatically. I'd think twice about buying the product if I were you. (Hint: ... buy an MP3 player instead)
Rating:
Summary: Mac Owner
Review: I bought this CD-RW a little less than a year ago. I thought the price was right at the time, since it included a rebate at the time. I own a Mac G3 (blue & white) running OS 8.6. I bought this so I could back-up some of the more important things from my hard drive. I think it's a bit slow, and I agree with what others have said about waisting most of you CDR's. I have been able to save my photos folder fine, but I can't seem to back-up anything like Palm Pilot info, e-mail, or any of the other things I want stored before doing a fresh install of my OS. When I try a burn in "simulation mode", many times my computer just locks up. I'm hoping the OS upgrade will help with some of these bugs. If you are buying a CD-RW for it's looks and don't plan to use it for anything too big, this will work fine. If you need a serious machine, that you can use for back-up, don't bother with this.
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