When VCR's and Tape players first came out, one of the first things that people wanted was a way to make their own copies of either a tape or a video.   When CD's first came out one of the things people were wondering was when they would be able to write to CD's.  The first CD writers that came out were SCSI devices and also, as DVD-R's are now, were expensive for a slow 1X CDR.  The first IDE CDRW that I purchased was an Acer 2X2X6 writer that managed to be rather fussy with burning both R's and RW's almost right from the day I bought it.  Since those 'dark' days, prices for CDRW's have come down while the speeds have continued to increase.

    MSI is a relatively new player in the CD-RW market.  They have started to diversify from their established motherboard business, into video cards and even CDR's, one of which we are looking at today.  The first CD-RW from MSI was released in early/mid 2001 and was the MS-8312, a 12X8X32 CD-RW.  Since then MSI has increased the speed of their CDRW's in an almost sequential sequence from 12X to 40X, for the CD-R writing speed.

The Box and Drive

    So what does this drive look like?  Are there any interesting features that make this burner different from the rest?  First lets see what comes with the burner, and what the retail box looks like.

    In a simplified list here is what you get in the box, besides the CDRW:

• Nero Burning ROM version 5.5.7.1 CD and Ahead InCD 3.2.2
• DOS driver disk
• 1 Blank 650MB CD-RW disk
• 1 Blank 700MB CD-R disk
• Nero Burning ROM Manual (seven languages)
• MSI CD-RW drive installation manual (also in seven languages)
• A CD Audio cable
• Pack of screws

    One of the things noticeably absent from the box was an IDE cable, while it wasn't really a problem in my case, it still would be a good idea for MSI to include a cable in the package, as it wouldn't cost very much. 

The Drive

    What about the drive itself, what does it look like what are its specifications?  For a complete list of the specifications please .  We will look at some of the more interesting features here.

    Now what are some of the interesting features that this drive offers?

• Buffer Size of 2MB - This is rather small as many drives have 4MB or more of buffer memory.  This isn't necessarily a problem if some sort of burn proof technology is included.

• Seamless Link" - Just like any other burnproof design it allows for a loss of the data stream without rendering the disk being written as a coaster.

• 100ms access time - This is nice to see as previous generations of CDRW's had much higher access times.  These access times are in line with a standard CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive

• 40X writing / 12X rewriting - High transfer rates, but do they meet up with real world tests?  We will have to see.

    The drive seems to be a Philips based drive, as the burn proofing technology called Seamless Link" (Philips tech), and the words Philips, on the bill seems to indicate.  The drive also supports writing to High Speed ReWritable disks, unlike my old 8/4/32 Plextor drive.  The drive also supports overburning, but when testing how much can be overburned to a disk, the drive didn't stop when the limit was reached but rather continued on to the end of the testing range.   The front facade is not completely covering the light coming from the front panel light, which seeps through the volume control on the facade as the picture below shows.

    How was installation?  It was very simple all I had to do was slide the drive in, screw it in, and then plug it in and it was ready to burn.

Software

    Now we've looked at the hardware, lets take a look at the software included in the package.

    Ahead's Nero Burning ROM is well know to anyone who does a fair amount of CD writing, and is one of the most feature filled CD writing programs available for use.  Version 5.5.7.1 that comes with the MSI drive can easily be upgraded to the latest version of Nero (5.5.9.0).  One thing about the software is that this particular revision was designed to work only with the MSI drive.  MSI isn't the only one who does this, so it isn't a major difference from any other manufacturer.  The basic design of the program hasn't changed for a while, but most of the progress has come under the 'hood' as it were, with the addition of many more formats available for use, and an integrated MPEG encoder. 

    The program automatically detects the maximum speed the blank CDR is rated for, in the case below it was using a blank generic CDR that was rated for 32X burning.

    Also included in the software is InCD 3.2.2 which is just like Roxio's Direct CD in that it is a packet writer for CD-RW discs that turns a CD-RW into a "large floppy disk"  I've personally found most packet writing software to be annoying at the least, and incompatible most of the time.  Doing a quick test between my two partitions, one partition with InCD install and on the other InCD wasn't installed, on a packet written CDRW, and two different drives, the files played fine except on my Pioneer in the partition without InCD installed.

    So the software does seem to add to the value of the hardware as both programs are some of the best writing tools (Nero) and packet writing tools (InCD) available, and are upgradable by going to and downloading the updates.  Now lets look at how well this hardware performs.

Test Setup

    Before we can look at the performance of the DragonWriter we need to see what kind of system it is going to be tested on and against what other hardware.