Vincent :
Bad luck for you i think :
i copied this from another site and an
expert :
Sorry
Theo L.
Review of CRW 2100EZ
no keysno keys----------------------
Don't let the price or rebate fool you! JUNK!
by djrobsd | Jul 26 '01
Pros: Price, but don't let it fool you
Cons: Noise and vibrations, doesn't work
The Bottom Line: Don't buy this drive, it's junk and will cause you a lot of grief. Spend the extra bucks for a Plextor.
Recommended: No
Let me start by saying that I am a very experienced computer user. I used to be a techie at a computer store, and I am A+ certified. I have never had any difficulty installing CD-Rs. While working there, I installed probably 5 different brands, into about 100 machines in total, and none of them ever gave me the hastles this Yamaha drive has. I bought this drive to replace my 4X Mitsumi drive which has never missed a beat after burning probably over 500 Cd's in the last couple years, and only 5 buffer under-runs, all of which were my fault due to trying to do too much at once on my computer.
My first bad taste was the noises and the vibration, which after reading other user reviews, I have found this to be a common problem with this drive. Unfortunately, I have 3 hard drives in my system, and this CDRW is mounted directly in between two of them, and the vibrations actually caused one of my hard drives to make a loud clicking sound! This made me very nervous because those sounds usually indicate hard drive failure is coming soon, so I was very nervous that this drive was actually damaging my hard drives.
Then I tried to burn a CD. I first tried burning 600 megs of MP3 files off my hard drive. The drive would not recognize any blank CD's I put into it. I rebooted my machine, and tried again, and it finally started burning! Unfortunately, after it wrote the table of contents, and started burning the files, the buffer quickly flushed out and I got a buffer under run. Coaster #1.
I then down graded the speed to 12x and tried again. Bad move, coaster #2, it did EXACTLY the same thing. It's almost like it fills the buffer only one time, burns the data, and then fails - it doesn't even appear to try and fill it again. At this point, I should mention that I was doing NOTHING else and had nothing open, so there was no way I was causing these CD's to die.
So, I then went to Yamaha's web site, and downloaded a firm ware upgrade, and also disabled DMA as per their recommendation. What a lousy web site, there is hardly any information on there. After upgrading the firm ware, I tried burning another CD, and it became another coaster.
My final attempt to make this drive work was to hook it up all by itself, and just try and burn ONE 10 meg MP3 file to the CD. So, I shut down and disconnected the IDE drive that was hooked up to the same controller, and set the Yamaha as a master. I then booted back up and tried burning a CD. What do you know? It wouldn't recognize the blank CD. So I rebooted, and it recognized it finally. So, it starts burning, and I was all excited when my screen went BLACK and my computer re-booted!
So after messing with this drive for 2 hours, it's going back to the merchant I purchased it from, and I will never buy another Yamaha again. I'm going to try Plextor, because I have heard only good things about it, but with these Yamahas it's all bad news from what I've read.
Good luck to anyone who wants to buy it. You might be saving $50 bucks or whatever the price difference is, but don't let that fool you. If you can even get it to work, you'll probably spend $50 bucks on CD's trying to make it work.
Amount Paid (US$): 107
Operating System: Windows
