- Package:
The OEM version that arrived at our offices included the drive (CRW2100E) and Ez CD Creator 4.02d-S25 version and the manual (very useful for novice users). The retail box will include additional Yamaha CDR and HS-RW media, IDE cable, screws and Audio cable. Yamaha plans also to ship SCSI (CRW2100S or CRW2100SX) and FireWire (CRW2100IX) versions soon. You can see the specs for the ATAPI model (2100e) over here.

The front of the CRW2100E is very typical. It includes the "16/10/40" logo as well the HS-RW standard logo. The drive uses only one lens for letting you know what exactly the drive do (red when writing, green when reading). Finally, you will find the manual eject hole and the headphone jack/volume control which most CD-Rom/RW drives have.

In the back of the drive you can see the usual connectors for IDE devices as well a short description above them. No cooling fan is supplied with the drive, which in all our tests seems to have a normal temperature even after a long use.

- Installation:
Installing the Yamaha CRW2100E was an easy process. We placed the drive as master in the secondary bus. During boot-up, the BIOS identified the drive as Yamaha CRW2100E. We then made some minor configuration changes to Windows ME. These were: disabling auto-insert notification and checking DMA (very important). The supplied drive was manufactured in September 2000 and the onboard firmware revision was version 1.0D. We also installed the bulked Ez CD Creator 4.02d-s25 for tests but we mainly used Nero 5.0.3.1/Ahead InCD v1.67. Yamaha released 1.0h firmware which now fixes various bugs and finally supports DAO-RAW. Highly recommended!

Yamaha also have teamed up with Ahead and offers Fast Audio Rip for getting 40x DAE ripping speed. The program seems very familiar with Ahea's coming Media Recorder and actually is an CD Player which also can rip wav files from AudioCDs. It also supports Equalizer, Skins, Nero's CD-Database. Yamaha CRW2100E owners might want to check it since it's free ;)

Note that according to the manual, you must have at least PII at 300mhz with a fast HD in order to be able to enjoy the drive. If not you will probably get poor performance. We also changed the test pc configuration from previous tests and for comparison reasons we re-measured all previous tested drives in order to have a clear view of the competition.

- 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
Plextor UltraPlex 40max firmware v1.04
PlexWriter PX-W1210S firmware v1.00 (TLA#000)
PlexWrtier PX-W1210A firmware v1.05 (TLA#000)
Yamaha CRW2100E firmware v1.0D