CD-R/RW drives have matured a lot since they first appeared. The price has
also come down a lot, as demonstrated by the exellent value for money of this
drive. Only a few years ago my brother got a 2x2x6 Ricoh drive from
Hisoft for around �250. That did include
an external SCSI case, but no software.
Getting the drive to work with MakeCD was fairly easy. MakeCD recognised the drive
as a Ricoh and used it's special Ricoh drive. This worked for most operations
but in particular Disk-At-Once mode didn't work. I tried changing the drive to
the standard SCSI-III one and everything worked fine.
The drive is very fast in operation. With the old 2x2x6 drive you would have to
wait several seconds for it to read a CD or perform some other minor operation.
The MP7060S does this very quickly, so fast you hardly notice. Checking a CDR
used to take about 20 seconds, now it takes 2.
The drive is also very reliable in use. It comes with a 2mb buffer internally
which at 6x (900KB per second) will give it just over two seconds of burning
even if MakeCD can't supply it with data. It also copes with buffer
underruns very well and doesn't lock up like some other drives do. The drive
can handle dirty or scratched CDs well too, even when reading them at high
speeds. For audio ripping it's exellent, I usually manage to rip at around
16x without any clicking or jittering. I think I could probably go a little
higher but by HDs and SCSI bus are the main limits there.
The drive seems to be fairly well made. It seems solid and is made of decent
quality material. The front of the drive is quite nice, although it could do
with some more LEDs. There is only one on the MP7060S which is green when
the drive is on and red when it is accessing. I would have prefered a separate
light for when the drive is burning, but the single light is adiquate. The
drive mechanism is fairly sturdy and comes with clips so that the unit can
be mounted vertically as well as horizontally. The front cover of the tray
has an air tight seal that prevents dust and the like getting in, a very
useful feature IMHO. The drive is also fairly quiet and doesn't produce much
heat.
The only real problem I have had with this drive is when trying to burn at
high speeds. Normally this is okay, but there are two situations when it
can cause problems. Firstly, my CDROM is not very good for audio ripping
and only manages about 3x or 4x speed. It usually picks up lots of clicks
and jitter anyway, so I usually use the MP7060S to first copy the tracks
to HD and then back to a CDR at 6x. This is much faster than forcing the
MP7060 down to 2x and produces better results. The other problem I sometimes
have is with burning ISO images (i.e. files) to a CD-R/RW. At 6x MakeCD can
only manage it with large (1mb+ files) which is okay for MP3s and movies.
At 4x (max speed for CD-RW which I use for backups) MakeCD can usually manage
to back up some of my HD as long as there aren't too many small files
and there is a large buffer (I use a 32mb buffer). These two problems arn't
really the fault of the MP7060S, the first is down to my CD ROM and the
second the speed of my 060. Maybe someone will do a PPC version of the
MakeCD ISO image creator?
