Home > Consumer Reviews > QPS QPCDRW161040FEM External 16x10x40 FireWire CD-RW Drive

After spending many frustrating hours with a crappy Iomega Predator, I finally gave up and went looking for something better and found it in this drive. Hooked it up and haven't had a single bad burn yet since I bought it almost a year ago. I burn all the time--it is fast, reliable, and durable. The case is a bit on the bulky side--even with the nice traveling case it's not what I'd call portable, but I don't really care.

This product is simply outstanding! Installation was a breeze, and I was burning CDs within 30 minutes. I haven't had any problems burning disks or reading the burned disks on other drives, despite a what finiky laptop.

I also like the handy carrying case for the drive, which goes well with a portable laptop.

By the way, this product comes with a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cable. If you have a laptop with a small (4 pin) firewire port, you should order a 6 pin to 4 pin firewire adapter/cable. ...

After great trouble getting several other makes to work, this one plugged in and worked with no trouble at all. Ratings like "16x" always seem to be too optimistic: after overhead it drops some, but this drive is still impressively fast. And it has the seemingly rare distinction of working fine with Retrospect in case you want to do full backups to it.

PLEASE HEED COMMENTS IN OTHER REVIEWS ABOUT POOR CUSTOMER SERVICE FROM QPS! I purchased a very similar QPS external RW drive (QPCDRW321040FL) that performed acceptably for about eight months...and then abruptly died. After determining that it was a hardware problem, I followed instructions that came with the burner to contact the company for information on how to return the drive for repair or replacement under the warranty. I have sent numerous email messages to the customer "service" department, with no reply. The form on the QPS web page for sending requests for customer service doesn't work (!). I called the QPS customer service department during business hours, waited on hold for about an hour and a half, and then was abruptly disconnected without being able to speak to anyone. I've even sent fax messages. No reply AT ALL from the company. I would never have purchased this burner if I had known that QPS had such poor regard for its customers. I STRONGLY recommend avoiding this company and its products if you have alternatives.

There have been some people leaving reviews for this product saying "why go external? Why go external?" Well look, if you've got a laptop that only has a DVD drive, or just a CD-ROM drive and you want to record your own CDs what do you do or even if you want to copy from one CD to another or some files off of a DVD what then?

Also have you thought that installing internals on a desktop on your own would void your warranty, because it does? And if something goes wrong then there you go, you're out of luck cause it's or own fault for cracking the case to put in a product.

As for the cost, yes we can easily see that cost is an issue. It's obvious externals will cost more.

Also, what about portability. I sure as heck don't want to buy two or three different drives for each computer I'll be using.

I could keep going, but but just think before you write. If you don't have anything directly product related, in regard to reviewing, just keep it to yourself. (I would take my own advice, but there are people out there not using these review places as they are designed to be used.)