52x CDRW Roundup - Page 2

- Optorite CW5201

OptoRite was founded in October 2001 by a group of highly experienced R&D and industry professionals from the optical storage field. The company focuses on solid R&D capability and innovational design. OptoRite has developed a series of high-speed CD-RW, combo drives and lately DVD recorders.

Optorite provided us its latest IDE CD-RW drive.The Optorite CW5201 supports 52x CAV maximum writing speed, 52x reading and 32x P-CAV US-RW rewriting. The specifications of the drive highly recommend us to compare it with the Premium drive.

The drive is equipped with a 2MB of cache and supports Video CD, CD+G and CD text reading. The supported writing modes are the TAO, DAO, SAO, RAW SAO 96 and DAW RAW 96.

EXACT-Rec (Enhanced eXtracting & Adapting Control Technology for Recording) monitors accuracy of writing and optimizes the writing power while burning and get the best burning quality.

The supported AWSS (Advanced Weighting Suspension System) technology reduces vibration & noise.

Buffer Underun errors are avoided with the BurnProof anti coaster technology, patented by Sanyo.

The supported reading and writing speeds are illustrated below.

A CDSpeed writing simulation gives us an idea of the writing strategy of CW5201. The CAV writing starts at 23.43x and finished at 51.53x, resulting to an average writing speed of 39.19x:

- The package

The retail package includes the Optorite CW5201 IDE drive, a quick installation guide and an application CD-ROM.

The CD burning application is Nero Burning Rom and InCD is included for packet writing.

Last, in the retail package you can find the usual internal audio cable, an IDE cable, mounting screws and an emergency eject pin.

On the disc loading tray you can see the "HS-RW" (should write US-RW) logo and the 52X32X52X indication. The disc/busy indicator LED lights up when the device is active. The drive has also a headphone jack and a headphone volume control.

On the rear panel there are the usual connectors, such as the power input, the ATAPI interface, the device configuration jumper, and the analog and digital audio output.

After removing the screws on the bottom we can see the drive's internal design. The drive's mainboard is designed by Optorite, and the pickup mechanism and chip are developed by Sanyo Electric LTD.

- Installation

The Optorite drive was identified as "OPTORITE CD-RW CW5201" under WinXP. The drive was installed to the secondary IDE channel of our test PC as a "Master"and worked in Ultra DMA Mode 2 transfer mode. The model came with firmware version v181E installed, as you can see in the Nero picture below: