TDK CyClone 241040 IDE CDR-W - Page 7

Conclusion

TDK's latest CyClone 241040 model is the fastest drive, at least according to its specifications. The 24x Zone-CLV writing speed is the fastest you can get nowadays, and can write a full 74min CD in 4mins. The drive's overall performance with CDR media was very good, even when using non-certified media. The drive's price (around 300$) might be an issue for the possible buyer but the retail package is pretty much full of goodies.

Getting into details about the drive's overall performance we can say that it is a very good CDR drive and the only point that will disappoint the user is the bad reading performance with protected CDs. We think that this should be a high priority matter for the manufacturers when they will be investigating future improvement. On the other hand the drive does support reading of SubChannel data (from both data/audio tracks) but as you might expected it failed to produce working SD2 protected backups.

How does the competition from Ricoh and Yamaha stands? It depends on the point you look at it. The Ricoh 7200A has been in the market for over one month and it is the second faster recorder you can buy. The Yamaha 2200E is, due to P-CAV writing technology, the slowest ultra high speed recorder and it hasn't started selling in many countries yet. The TDK CyClone 241040 has just started selling itself around Europe/USA, so the choice is very difficult…