- Introduction

CyberDrive increases the competition in optical recording market with the new IDE proposal for writing at 48X. Judging from the previous models of the Taiwanese company, we expect a fast recorder that will fairly share the leading positions with manufacturers such as Yamaha, Asus and LiteOn, in the performance charts. Furthermore, and of the strong weapons of CyberDrive is the attractive price..

- Features

The CyberDrive CW088D supports 48X maximum reading speed (CAV) for CD-R, 16X re-writing speed (CLV) and 48X writing speed (CAV). The current firmware version installed is v.110F and of course is equipped with flash memory allowing easy firmware upgrade.

The drive also includes a 2MB cache buffer, and the supported disk formats are CD-DA, CD-ROM, CD-ROM / XA, mixed mode, Video-CD, Photo CD, Enhanced CD, CD Plus, CD-G, CD-Text among with the CD-UDF compatibility.

Buffer Underun errors are avoided with the "ExacLink" adopted feature. The drive's specifications also give the CyberDrive an 100ms average access time and a 40X maximum audio extraction speed. The drive utilizes a High Precise Sledge Control (HPSC) type traverse mechanism to improve access time while reducing acoustic seek noise.

- Recording speeds

CyberDrive CW088D uses the CAV for the 48X and P-CAV for the 40X speed. Nero CDSpeed reports that the average theoretical writing speed for the 48X category is 37.80X.

While using several media, we noticed the drive reached 50X writing speed, increasing further the average writing speed to 38.03X:

The 40X P-CAV also leads to a 31.86X average writing speed. For the rest supported speeds, the adopted technology is the Z-CLV, as you can see in the corresponding CDSpeed graphs for the 32X and 36X.

Lastly, with HS-RW media the CW088D can write up to 16X:

- Unpacking

The European retail package includes the drive, a multilingual user's manual CD-ROM, a quick installation guide, an audio cable and mounting screws. Nero Burning Rom and InCD are the writing/packet writing software offered among with one 700MB blank 48X CD-R, and one 650MB 16X HS-RW disc. The price for Europe is Euro 87 plus V.A.T.

On the front panel (tray) there are just the "HS-RW" logo, the eject button, the operation led and a emergency eject hole. Notice that the drive does not include the CyberDrive logo, headphone jack and volume control button, as it is showed in the retail kit package. CyberDrive ensured that the future shipments you will have in your hands will have a complete front bezel.

On the rear panel there are Power connector IDE interface connector , Device configuration jumper (Master, Slave, CSEL), Analog audio line out (4P), Digital audio out (2P)

- Installation

Windows XP recognized the drive July 2002 model as "CyberDrv CW088D". It supports both PIO mode 4 and UDMA mode 2.