Lacie introduces USB2 CD RW drive

14th November - 2001
By Ian Burley

Mac and PC peripherals company, Lacie, has announced a portable CD RW drive that is compatible with the new, much faster, USB 2.0 interface standard.

USB 2.0 is backwards compatible with USB 1.1, that is now virtually standard on most PCs and many peripherals. USB 1.1 operates at a theoretical maximum data transfer rate of 12 megabits/second. USB 2.0 ups this by a factor of 40x to 480Mbits/sec.

In reality, USB doesn’t deliver its maximum theoretical speed and USB 1.1 will often only work at under 10Mbits/second - maybe under a megabyte per second. This is not good news for CD burners as they require a reliable and high speed interface to record onto CD without errors. USB 2.0 should be able to accommodate the ever-faster new generations of such equipment.

The LaCie CDRW241040 is one such piece of equipment. It can burn suitable CD media at up to 3.6MB/sec - or a whole 650MB CD in about 2 minutes. That would have been impossible using USB 1.1. The drive can also write a CDRW disc at 1.5MB/sec and reads at a speed of 40x. Such speeds were previously only possible using relatively expensive SCSI or FireWire equipped CD-rewriters. A cheaper and slightly slower USB 2.0 drive, the CD-RW161040, is also available.

When connected to PCs only equipped with slower USB 1.1 controllers, the drive is restricted to 4x speed operations.

The LaCie CD-RW241040 is hot-pluggable, meaning it can be removed or swapped with other devices without requiring the computer to be restarted. The drive also sports Buffer Under-Run protection (referred to as ‘BURP’ by HP) to ensure error-free recording no matter which version of USB is used.

Bundled software includes the LaCie Recording Utilities CD package and all the necessary drivers for both PCs and Macs. LaCie Recording Utilities include Adaptec Toast v5 for Mac and Adaptec Easy CD Creator v5 for Windows 98SE/NT/2000/ME. With the release of Linux 2.4, FireWire is supported in the Linux operating system. Other Linux users may download X-CD-Roast from the Internet.

The LaCie CD-RW161040 will be available an estimated street price of £139 +VAT and £169+VAT for the CDRW241040.

www.lacie.co.uk

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