Home > Consumer Reviews > QPS QPCDRW121032FEM External 12x10x32 Firewire CD-RW Drive

Tested on: Mac G4-400 (AGP model year 2000) Mac OS 9.1 Roxio Toast 5.01

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ;)

* Great case design (translucent grey & semi-opaque white, matches G4 case design) * Virtually silent operation * Nifty included carry bag * Cannot really write CDs from MP3s in Toast at 12x without buffer underruns * CAN write audio CDs at 8x from MP3s fine, or at 12x from an audio CD image. * Can write direct from my inbuilt DVD player at 4x (fails at 8x or 12x with buffer underrun unless BURN proof is on, which slows it down.)

I just got my Que 12x10x32 CDRW drive (firewire) which replaced my LaCie 8x4x32x which I returned to LaCie recently due to a problem with their firewire bridgeboard hanging my computer....

My inital impression of the drive was "WOW!" It comes in the box packed in this neat vinyl leather-look bag which is designed with little compartments to hold the powerpack (yes it is external, but small and helps to keep the case size compact) as well as the Firewire cable, drive, and even a 'token' pouch to store one CDR disc.

Installation is easy. Plug it in to power, plug in firewire, and as long as you have OS 9.1 the OS will automatically see the drive. Toast 5.01 immediately recognised it as QPS PX-W1210A Firewire. (Remember I am talking about a Mac here, not Windows).

I was particularly pleased that the drive does not have a noisy fan, or any fan at all judging by its complete silence in the room. Thank god. The LaCie drive sounded like a jumbo accellerating along the runway (and that was while idling).

The drive I got is a Plextor W121032A mechanism unlike many people who seem to have got the Teac mechanism. Fortunately the Plextor mechanism has BURN-proof built in to protect you from buffer underruns. Basically it turns the laser off to avoid writing a blank patch (and therefore turning your CD-R into a 'coaster') if the computer doesn't feed data to it fast enough.

The firmware version on the drive I got is 1.07. On the Plextor website it is up to 1.08 but their version history for 1.08 did not suggest that there were really major improvements in the 1.08 firmware version.

The good news is that it burns data at 12x no problems.

HOWEVER ... burning audio is another matter altogether. I initially tried burning at 12x with BURN-Proof off. It almost immediately failed with a buffer underrun error DESPITE the fact that the speed tests in toast indicated that Toast was decoding MP3s fast enough for 12x write speeds. (Toast said 12x needed 2Meg per second and Toast was decoding at 2.6Mb per second.)

I was successful at burning an audio CD at 12x with BURN-Proof on, but you could see burn proof springing into action every few seconds (the indicator light on the CD changes from orange to green while writing to indicate this). It ended up taking 9min 03sec to write a 65min CD, hardly 12x!

Then I tried writing the same CD at 8x with BURN-Proof OFF and it finished in about 8 mins, which is about true 8x speed.

Very disappointing that my 12x drive seems not to be able to write audio at 12x. However it does seem to be my G4-400 not being able to send the decoded MP3s to the drive quick enough because when I wrote the MP3s to an audio CD image on my hard drive (Toast decodes the Mp3s as it writes the image), that wrote fine at 12x.

Finally, I tested burning a CD copying directly from my G4-400's DVD drive. I have always found this drive exceptionally speedy at reading CDs, especially in the digital audio extraction side of things so I was hopeful that it would be able to read directly at a decent speed. Unfortunately 8x and 12x failed with buffer underrun unless BURN-Proof was on, but as I mentioned earlier even with BURN-Proof on you don't get the true speed of 8x or 12x. So basically if you want to copy CD to CD, you have to do it at 4x.

Overall I would say I am happy with the performance of the drive and would recommend it as long as you don't mind burning at 8x or 4x under certain circumstances.

By the way, if you are going to use a 12x or 16x drive you HAVE to use good media. The cheap media can't cope with being written to at that speed. I have had flawless results with imation, TDK and Kodak CDs.

Hope you have found this review useful, as I wasted about 10 CDs testing the various write modes of the CD-RW!! ;-)

All the best Dan

I haven't made any coasters in 15 tries, which is good. The product is fast, but there are periods when it has to do overhead and it doesn't write. Overall, I do audio CD tracks to a full CD-R in 10 minutes or so, which is OK.

The software is a little quirky. Sometimes the Dell Inspiron 8000 will not shut down if the drive is still active. It isn't too big a deal to disconnect it, but this is still a problem. This drive also doesn't like being daisy chained with Firewire hard drives, and will sometimes lock up.

If you simply plug this device in and use it (by itself) I haven't found any defects. The latest version of Easy CD is much better than the earlier ones, on balance, despite the glitches. My computer came with the Firewire interface, which is great. I only wish it were standard on all PC's.

I started out using this unit just for the basics, compiling a favorites Audio CD from my CD collection with no problems. Things got a little tricky-er when I was writing from Pro Tools recording software. You have to watch what your doing with the Toast software. It works well if you give it what it wants, but I had to make about 5 coasters to find out what it wanted to see from Pro Tools. This unit is not for the attention-span challenged! You have to work with it a little bit to understand it's do's and don'ts, but after you sus it out a bit, it really delivers!

Bought this about a year ago for the business, and it has been slowly dieing a painful death by bad power supply for the past three months. QPS is no help on-line and there is no toll-free number to call them up on. Of course the pitiful warranty is expired as well, and I don't have time for this foolishness.

Makes a nice EXPENSIVE paperweight I suppose.

Bought it as a backup device for photos (works fine) and as a backup device for my iMAC. Was supposed to work with Retrospect. Well, apparently there are two different QPS QPCDRW121032FEM External 12x10x32 Firewire CD-RW Drives. Mine has Teac innards and isn't certified to work with Retrospect (Dantz' way of saying that it's not supported and gets a Type 2 error on my iMAC DV). The Plexor(?) innards supposedly work. How does someone order the right one over the Internet if you can't look through the translucent case before you buy it?