Artec 52X 24X 52X CDRW Series

The Artec 52X 24X 52X CD-RW Series
The drive is on fire, we don't need no water, let that baby burn!

By Tom Laverriere
June 24, 2003

CD-RW drive technology has come a long way from its prehistoric introduction at 2X burn speeds.  The first CD-RW drives in the mainstream took up to thirty minutes to burn a disc and it was pretty much a crap shoot on whether the burn would finish successfully.  There were some of us that accumulated quite a few coasters from that era.  For the most part, those days are over.  The future is now and in high tech electronics and you can have it here much sooner than usually anticipated.  Today's CD-RW drives burn at ever increasing speeds and do so with more precision and accuracy than ever before.  The fastest drives on the market today punch out a whopping 700MB of data in a mere two-plus minutes, thanks to optical technologies maturing and improving with every passing day.

A little less than a year ago the first 52X CD-RW drives trickled into the market.  Now they are common place in many computer systems.  Today we are going to show you another one of those 52X drives brought to us by Artec.  Although Artec has not been around long, they are looking to make a dent in the optical drive arena with their latest product, a 52X 24X 52X CD-RW drive.  We put this drive through the paces to show you if it could stand out in such a crowded field.  Let's have a look...

The Artec 52X CD-RW in detail Burn it up in the blink of an eye!

CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR AN ENLARGED VIEW
 
 

Some of you may be asking, what's the difference?  A 52X CD-RW drive, is a 52X CD-RW drive, right?  Well, some of you may be right, but there do exist subtle differences and with Artec, once of those is the price.  A quick price engine search on price showed this drive for as low as $36 US.  At that price point, it's hard not to get into the CDRW game..  Coming in at such a low price point does have its disadvantages and with the Artec drive, as the included bundle was its shortcoming.  The drive shipped with the usual accessories to get up and running, but did not include any blank media in which to get started with.  Granted, many of us already have blank media kicking around, but going back to the point we just made, there are some us just getting into CD-RW drive technology that do not have any blank media available.  It would have been nice to see Artec at least bundle one CD-R disc with this drive.

The Artec 52X 24X 52X drive name says it all.  This drive is able to burn CD-R discs at max speed of 52X ( 7800KB/s ) and rewrite media at a max speed of 24X ( 3600KB/s ).  For those of you looking to rip data/audio, this drive can do so at 52X as well.  This drive comes with a 2MB internal buffer, since with the maturity of CDRW technology, big internal buffers are no longer a dire need.  In fact it's the standard spec we are seeing on most high speed burners these days.  To account for the small buffer, Artec employs what it likes to call "Superlink", which is supposed to eliminate any errors or buffer under-runs that can occur during the burning process.  Now that we've shown you what this new CDRW drive offers, let's see if Artec can spin with the optical-drive big boys.

Software, Test Setup and Preliminary Testing