Home > Consumer Reviews > QPS Que! 8x4x32 Rewritable External Firewire CDRW Drive

I'll start by saying that I have a cheaper Qué drive, I have the 4X4X24 firewire drive, basically the same except slower. I have had a great experience with my drive. Because of the firewire interface it is extremely fast, and gets the full speed that the drive itself is capable of. I use it not only as a CD recorder and rewriter, but as a second CD rom drive, becasue it is as fast as the internal DVD drive on my iMac DV. The firewire interface also means that you must have an iMac DV, Blue and white G3 or a G4, or else a previous power mac that has been upgraded. As far as I know, no PCs come with this port, but they can be upgraded to cheaply, and the drive is PC compatible (as technology advances, most PCs probably have this port now, I haven't been keeping up, so yours may if it's new, and if you have a port to plug your DV camcorder into, that's the port.) I have burned a few CDs so far, and read alot of them. It never skips when I play audio CDs (and I shook it for a while to check) and if the computer crashes during burning and CD players can't read it, you can fix it simply by adding another file or song to the CD, and it will fix it. The drive isn't exactly small, but it is pretty light, and the case is pretty durable. The only shortcoming is the software that comes with it (at least for macs) is a very basic version of Toast, which I will upgrade as soon as I get the money. All in all it is a great drive, and a pretty good price for what you get, and I would recommend it to anyone!

...I hooked it up to my iMac DV SE as per the instructions,turned on the Que, clicked on the Toast Icon and it was that simple. 5 minutes later I was burning my first CD and another 3 minutes later I popped it into my home stereo - it played perfectly.

Great product and performance - it burns a 72 minute CD in about 8 minutes.

looks cool too

When I bought my iBook this fall, I decided to get this drive so I could burn CDs from both my iMac DV SE and the new iBook DV SE. The drive has proved very reliable and it has been a cinch to setup on whatever machine that has firewire. The included case is a nice touch, making it nicely portable so my friends can borrow the drive for their occasional backup or CD Mix that they want to create.

The only thing to be careful of is that you get media that is rated for high-speed burns. I tried to burn one of my first discs with some media that worked fine in my 2x SCSI burner on my PC, but it was only rated to 4x burns. Make sure that whatever media that you buy says 8x or more to prevent coaster creation. (This is something that I learned from my buddy who is a recording engineer and he burns about 20+ CDs a day.)

I haven't tried it on my PC (no firewire card there yet), but I would expect it to work nicely as I have a friend with this drive for his PC.

MacWorld recently gave this drive a great review in their Nov. 2000 issue. But I was really worried when I saw user's comments in the MacWorld forum. It seemed like almost everybody was having problems with QPS. Especially with customer service. I bought the drive anyway and it works great on my iMac DV. I didn't need to visit QPS's web site for drivers or call tech support. I was able to make a CD-RW backup of some of my important files and to my surprise I was able to burn an audio cd that worked flawlessly in my car's cd player. I used to use a Yamaha burner at work to make audio cds, but those cds worked intermittently. I am very happy with my QPS drive. I also bought the grape colored panels to match my iMac.

What a great product! If you are a Mac user, and need a CD burner that will work... get this one and save yourself the trouble.

I previously owned the IOMega usb CD burner and had nothing but problems with it. I was intruiged by its bargain price... but like they say: "you get what you pay for".

I broke down and bought this burner, despite its price. I had heard from enough people that USB burners "just don't cut it - save yourself the trouble and buy FireWire". They were right. This burner has given me NO problems whatsoever. I have burned close to 100 CDs on it and not ruined a single one thanks to Que!Fire's burnproof technology. This is not to mention the fact that I can burn 80 minutes of music in 8 minutes with no lagging in the sound quality.

I might also note that this burner comes with a leather carrying case. I don't really plan on bringing my burner with me when I travel... so the case has in turn made for a fantastic toiletry case... a pocket for my razor, toothpaste, razor.......