August 28th, 2000
by Dave Hamilton VST Portable CD-RW Drive Introduction We recently had the opportunity to do some long-term testing with VST's Portable CD-R/W drive, and overall we were very impressed. This is a slimline drive, about three-quarters of an inch thick, certainly suited for users on-the-go, but would (and did) work just as well for someone who wants to save a little desk space with their desktop machine. We put the drive through the standard paces, added some steps to that list just for good measure, and everyone lived to tell the tale. Most of us were even happier at the end, too! But lets get to the details and questions everyone has. Is A USB CD-RW Ok To Use? This is a question that's heard quite a bit when discussing CD-R/W drives. There have been some mixed reports here, and this was certainly a concern of ours when we started working with this drive. Our experience, however, was extremely pleasant. During extensive testing on both a Pismo PowerBook 400MHz, or a 500MHz G4, there was never once a problem with the USB bus becoming a bottleneck and thwarting our attempts to burn a CD. The drive was easily hot-swappable, and never had a problem being recognized by the computer. Adaptec's Toast, which shipped with the drive, was even smart enough to recognize the drive if you plugged it in WHILE Toast was running. Not a bad deal at all, especially considering that, up until now, we had to deal primarily with SCSI for our CD-R/W needs. Every tester here would stand up and shout, "We'll take USB over SCSI any day of the week for a CD-R/W." Ain't that the truth. (For those of you acting as double-agents out there, this drive performed equally as well on the Windows side of things, with nary a problem). Media Tolerance This is probably the second most popular question everyone had with this drive. Due to its size, it would be natural to assume that the drive might be particular about the types of media that it took. Once again, the drive pleasantly surprised us. Never once did we have a bad burn, and we burned over 50 CD-R disks and CD-R/W disks during our time with this drive. Among the various Media we used were "middle of the road" 74-minute media, "real cheap" 80-minute media, and we even burned 5 or 6 CD-R's on to a stack of very old CompUSA 74-minute media that no other CD-R/W that we've tried will even recognize anymore. All the CDs worked fine after burning, including Audio CDs, with some of those burned directly from MP3s (note that only the standard edition of Toast is included with the drive -- to burn MP3s directly to disk without prior conversion requires Toast Deluxe).
For us, this is a resounding "Yes" (did you hear it resound? We knew you would). With MACWORLD Expo NY2000 included in our testing period, we decided to test the road-worthiness of this drive and pack it in a suitcase on the way to the Big Apple. Not only did it stand up to the harsh, sun-baked conditions inside the baggage compartments of today's aircraft, but it is small enough to slip into a laptop carrying case for a day on the road. In addition to size affecting the portability of this drive, it also makes it very easy to fit onto our already cluttered desks. The cables included with the drive gave us plenty of room to move it around, and it seemed to operate just fine even if we jostled it (or flat out moved it) during a burn. The one thing that was a little odd was that the power and data connectors hook into the side of this drive, making its effective width about two-and-a-half inches wider than the drive itself. It was certainly a workable situation, but would have been easier for us had those connectors been on the back of the drive instead of the side. But Some Of Us Want To Know The Juicy Details The drive is rated at 4x4x8x, meaning that it will write normal CDs at 4x, read/write CD-R/Ws at 4x, and read normal CDs at 8x. We found that the drive operated right in line with these speed ratings, and all of the tests that we refer to here were performed at the highest speed possible for that particular operation. Never once were we forced to slow the drive down to successfully complete any testing at all. The drive measures 6.8 inches in length, by 5.4 inches in diameter, by a mere .75 inches tall! As mentioned, the cable connectors add another couple of inches to the working diameter of this drive, but even still the drive is impressively small and slim. As mentioned, the drive is bundled with Adaptec's Toast version 4, and this allows the drive to operate in disk-at-once, session-at-once, track-at-once, multi-session and packet writing modes, all of which worked just perfectly in our tests. The drive supports all of the popular CD formats, including UDF, ISO9660, Mixed Mode, and Audio. Battery Lifes Well, you wouldn't be allowed to use the word "portable" without including some way of having the drive power itself (or having the computer power the drive... more on that later). VST certainly held up their end of the bargain by putting a rechargeable battery pack in the drive itself (which recharges anytime the power cable is connected to the drive, assuming the removable batteries are actually inside the unit). Our results with the batteries were varied. On one hand it was very nice to be able to burn CDs without worrying about a plug for the drive. This was especially helpful in New York City hotel rooms where they give you exactly one outlet to be shared between your laptop, razor, cell phone charger, air freshener, and CD burner. Don't they know better? In any event, our experience was that we could successfully burn a minimum of 3 CDs on a "fully charged" battery, occasionally getting up to as many as 7 CDs on one charge. This is certainly a Good Thing. However, some improvements could be made to this aspect of the drive. The one single light on the drive changes color depending on the battery's state of charge, but there was no real way to tell how much longer the battery had, and whether or not our proposed burn would work on the drive. It left us feeling a bit uneasy when starting a battery-dependant burn, because we really had no way of knowing whether it make it to the end or not. The other problem was that the drive does not go into any sort of "sleep" mode when on battery power. We started a burn one evening (on a fully charged battery) and then left the office. When we came into the office the next morning, the drive was as dead as a doornail. The burn had completely successfully, and then the drive just sat there and burned up its battery and died. Plugging power in remedied this problem (and let us get our fresh new 80-minute, Britney Spears, MP3-originated CD out of the drive), but we were surprised to see the drive hadn't "saved" its battery by sleeping once the burn had finished. Conclusion All in all, this drive is a sweetheart, and we will (and have) recommend(ed) it to anyone looking for a CD-R/W, period. Its portability is certainly a bonus factor here, but this drive is perfect for anyone, and especially so in a multiple-computer environment. It is easy to pop this drive between computers (and as mentioned above, will work on both Macs and PCs), so an entire office could share just one burner that anyone could use on their PC. Our recommendation -- if you need a CD burner and have a USB port on your machine, go get it! (See? We told you we had been recommending this thing!). One thing of note: Unavailable still at press time, VST is promising a replacement data cable for this drive that will let it connect directly to the FireWire port of any Mac or PC. Not only would this free up a seat on your USB bus, but it also gives you the option of powering the drive directly from the computer, something possible even with the new Pismo PowerBooks. This would alleviate all the problems with battery life expectancy, as one could monitor their PowerBook's battery for estimated time remaining before shut down. We expect this cable to be available shortly, and will likely post a follow-up report based on our experience with it.
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Does Size Really Matter?