TEAC CD-516EB IDE CDR-W - Page 1

Introduction:
This year turned out very productive for many CD-RW drive manufacturers. In November 2000 Yamaha first shipped its 16x model. In the following months TDK gave its 16x recording proposal (January) and Plextor did not stay out of the game announcing Plexwriter …..in February. Meanwhile TEAC didn't show any market activity till March2001, when decided-a little late- to strike again with a new drive solution for your recording needs.

After launching the CD-W512EB 12X CD-RW drive last year, the company entered the 16X recording market with the new CD-W516EB CD-RW drive. All previous TEAC CDR-W drive had excellent seek times and fast reading speeds. All we have to see is if the new drive will fulfill user's needs for a drive upgrade at 16X recording. Is TEAC's proposal worth waiting? What about the other 16x writing competition?

- Features:
The Teac CD-W516EB supports 16x writing (CLV), 10x re-writing and 40x reading (in some modes CAV and in others Z-CAV:

CD-ROM Mode1,CD-ROM XA Mode 2 (form1) (40x CAV)

CD-RW, CD-ROM XA Mode 2 (form2), CD-DA (17-32x Z-CAV)

That of course as you can imagine gives Teac a bit lower reading speeds, especially in the DAE but we will see that later. Teac's excellent (<85ms) seek time is also here (standard for all Teac CD-ROM/CDR-W drives) and a huge >100.000 MTBF gives users another point to think about.... Last even Teac doesn't write it anywhere, the drive supports BURN-Proof technology. For some reason Teac says that the drive supports "Write-Proof" technology and not "BURN-Proof". Different words for the same subject? Possibly...

- Supplied Package:
The package supplied was both the retail and bulk Europe versions. Both packages contain: The drive itself, 1 CD-R 74min blank, 1 High Speed RW Blank and Nero 5.5 (!) as the main CDR software. The retail has in addition: an operation manual, Audio cables and the neseccery IDE cable.

Let's take a look at the drive itself. The front of the drive looks like a exactly the same as the previous CD-W512EB 12X drive, since nothing seems to have changed. You can see the usual eject button, the headphone input jack/volume selector and two leds:

At the back of the drive you will find the usual connectors (IDE interface, power), the jumpers for setting the drive to Master/Slave option, the analogue and the digital audio output connectors and 3 jumpers which are not used (factory reserved).

Installation:

ATAPI CDR-W drives are simple to install. Just decide what the drive should be, master or slave, set the appropriate jumper and start! After booting, the CDR-W identified itself as the "TEAC CD-W516EB". We unchecked the Auto Insert notification, checked DMA and rebooted. The drive was a March 2001 model with firmware revision v1.0A.For most of our tests we used the Nero v5.5.1.1 among with Ahead InCD v2.11 (for packet writing tests), CloneCD 3.0.0.9 and Padus DJ 3.00.780.

Test Machine:
WinMe OS
Soyo 7VCA
Celeron II 566 over clocked to 850 MHz
128MB SDRAM PC 133
WD 18GB UDMA 66
Quantum Fireball EX 6.4 GB UDMA 33
DAWI 2975 - PCI (ULTRA) SCSI Host Adapter
ATI AIW 128
Yamaha CRW2100E v1.0h
PleXWriter PX-W1610A v1.01 (TLA #0000)
Sanyo CRD-BP1400P v5.29
TEAC CD-W516EB v1.0A