Introduction :
CDR-102 SCSI was the first CD Recorder I have ever owned. It was a breakthrough back then, with all this great reading/writing capabilities… After that I went for a Yamaha 4x4x16 CDR which was later replaced by the Yamaha 8x4x24 CDR drive. Well, If someone ever asked me, what cdr would he/she buy back then, I'd certainly propose for a Yamaha series CDR drive. That was back then… But, how about nowadays?... Today Yamaha is still here. In the meantime however, several new 'players' invaded into the cd-recording playground… Sometimes they had better things to offer, inovative technologies to propose (BURN-PROOF, JUSTLINK), not to mention the higher recording speeds. Yamaha undoubtedly is one of the best CDR manufacturers in the CDR-industry. So, it's next move should have been fast and efficient. The CDRW2100x series came to fill the empty gap on the top of Yamaha CDR-devices. Everyone knew that those drives should have been unique and fast… at least faster than the competition…

- Package:
The RETAIL version that arrived in our offices included the drive itself (CRW2100S-VK), SCSI/Audio cables, additional jumpers for setting the SCSI ID to another number (other than 3 which is the default), and 4 screws for the drive consolidation into a computer's 5,1/4" bay. The software included was the Adaptec's Ez CD Creator 4.02d-S25 version, DirectCD 3.0 and Take Two 1.0 (all into one cdrom). The package also included an additional Yamaha CDR (16x certified), an HS-RW media and finally, the user manual (very well printed, high detailed; essential for novice users).

The front of the CRW2100S-VK 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 does (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 SCSI 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 and painful use.

- Installation:
The installation was pretty easy. We only had to change the SCSI-ID from 3 (default) to 5. During the boot-up, the SCSI host adapter identified the drive as Yamaha CRW2100S. We then made some minor configuration changes to Windows ME. These were: disabling auto-insert notification and checking Sync Data Transfer (very important if your SCSI adapter has no bios - we checked it anyway). The supplied drive was manufactured in December 2000 and the onboard firmware revision was version 1.0H. We also installed the bulked Ez CD Creator 4.02d-s25 for tests but we mainly used Nero 5.0.4.0/Ahead InCD v1.80.

-Yamaha CRW-2100S and Nero 5.0.3.1:
At the time we were performing these tests, we were mainly using (at the beginning) the Nero 5.0.3.1. Under this application CRW2100S seems that it was not properly recognized. Therefore with a common CDRW media test (not HSRW) we had the following results: The drive reported that it was able to write at 16x (2400k/s) but the whole process was actually working at 4x (600k/s) - we identified this with windows system monitor...

This problem ceased to exist on the latest Nero 5.0.4.0 (private beta version), which identifies both media and drive properly. We suggest that you upgrade to this version, once it's fixing such problems.

- Test Machine:
WinMe OS
Soyo 7VCA
Celeron II 566 over clocked to 850 MHz
128MB SDRAM PC 133
VIA 4 in1 4.27
VIA IDE BUS 3.01.1 (miniport version)
WD 18GB UDMA 66
Quantum Fireball EX 6.4GB
SCSI card: DAWI 2975 - PCI (ULTRA)
ATI AIW 128
Hitachi GD-7500 IDE DVD-ROM
PleXWriter PX-W1610A firmware v1.00 (TLA #0000)
Sanyo CRD-BP4 firmware v4.28
TDK CyClone 161040 firmware v5.29
Yamaha CRW2100S firmware v1.0h (SCSI-ID 5)