Pictures
Click for larger images.
On the left is the drive in all its' glory with the cool looking case. The right picture is the rear of the unit. On the right you can see that instead of using a CD audio cable for Redbook playback, LaCie places 2 RCA connectors for playback. There is also a 3.5mm headphone jack on the front of the drive to plug headphones directly in. Noteworthy are the USB connector, power cable connector, and on/off switch.
Installation
Installation is about as easy as it's going to get for CD-RW drives. Plug in the power cord, plug in the USB cord, power on and you are ready to go. Windows 98 and ME users can simply plug in the drive and are ready to go. Windows 2000 users will need to install the LaCie USB driver before plugging in the drive as Windows 2000 does not have the proper driver included.
After installing the physical drive, all that is left is the software. Included on the driver CD are Adaptec's Direct CD and Easy CD Creator for the PC, and Toast for MAC users. On both our Windows Millennium and 2000Pro machines, after installing Easy CD Creator the systems became so unstable that they were not usable. Upgrading to version 4.02E1 fixed the problems under Windows ME, but not on Windows 2000. According to Adaptec any version from 4.02D onwards will run on Windows 2000, but even after upgrading, Easy CD Creator crashed while trying to access the CD drive. Most users report that Easy CD runs fine under Windows 2000 so we suspect a driver conflict is the problem. For testing purposes we used Nero Burning ROM version 5.0.3.1 under Windows 2000 Pro.
The test and benchmarks
