TDK “veloCD” External FireWire CD-RW Drive
Review

Now for our discussion of the product under consideration.

It is a 24x-10x-40x model http://www.tdk.com/veloCDfe/index24xfe.html that is identical in every way except nominal top speed from TDK’s soon-to-be-released newer models in the faster CD-R burn speed range. My brief research located 24x units for purchase, but faster drives may be available to buy by the time you read this review. Competition keeps prices in the $200 – $250 range for recent and current models, so don’t make yourself crazy searching for extreme bargains.

TDK is proud of the success of their “veloCD” products, especially since they are the top sellers in their category (primarily for internal drives in Windows CPUs). Here’s a quote from their press release:

GARDEN CITY, NY, March 11, 2002 – TDK Electronics Corp. today announced that its veloCD ReWriters were the number one selling CD-RW drives at retail in January 2002 according to NPD INTELECT, a leading independent provider of sales tracking services. Combined sales of all internal and external veloCD models placed TDK as the top seller of CD burners for the month; with the 24X internal veloCD as the single best-selling burner overall.

PR notwithstanding, our review unit is an exceptional piece of hardware that works brilliantly with ToastLite 5.0.2.

HOW “veloCD” PERFORMS IN OS 9

Installation was easy, but be aware the printed manual is not correct regarding insertion of the DIN connector. You need to plug it into the “CD IN” location on the rear of the asymmetrical drive, then into its power brick.

A rear power switch turns on an attractive blue light bar top center of the sleek, stylish silver-blue “veloCD”. A handy push button lower front right opens and closes the media drawer. The front of this drawer doubles as the front top of the burner, in a successful move to design clean, functional hardware.

Once your blank CD-R is in place, ToastLite makes the disk creation experience almost effortless. The TDK drive showed up as: “TDK CDRW241040B(MMC3)-FireWire,” which says it all. My first burn was a ToastLite music COPY of 34-minute “Rockin’ Fifties” (#JCD-3202) for one of my young music students who wants to learn “Great Balls Of Fire” and “Be-Bop-A-Lula” from the source.

This dupe disc cooked perfectly at 24x, featuring medium-volume white noise during the burn. TDK’s blue “LED Light Pipe Tube” pulsed on and off during the process, which is a groovy light show for all you readers who missed the late Ô60s first time around. I went outside my home office for a few minutes to check on the contents of my pack rat trap, and when I returned, “Your disk is ready” greeted me from my iMac’s screen.

Next I copied a personal favorite, “Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, Volume Two,” (#979201-2) to test audio quality. Perfection at 8x, with the drive noise a very quiet whisper that made my fanless DV iMac sound loud by comparison.

During the next two weeks I used “veloCD” daily in AUDIO, DATA, and COPY modes, always at nearly-silent 8x except when I was testing the drive’s top speed, which is nice and quick. For all you techie speed demons, my 400MHz iMac DV burned a ToastLite DATA disk of my entire 700MB System Folder at 24x in just under five minutes, start to finish. Very agreeable.

WHAT COMES IN THE PACKAGE

TDK provides a FireWire cable, but it is not necessary to use their cable as opposed to any other, from my experience. Software on their CD is the aforementioned ToastLite plus versatile MusicMatch Jukebox, which I used in previous versions with erratic results. Purchasers also receive one 200MB CD-RW and two blank 700MB CD-R media disks, plus a (great idea!) CD Mark permanent marker for writing on your disks, and a cute little L-shaped pin for emergency disk ejection from the drive.

The printed manual is surprisingly informative in today’s era of skimpy manuals and excruciating PDF documentation. Noteworthy is Minimum System Requirements of 128MB of memory, which a surprising number of consumer iMacs and iBooks do not possess. TDK provides a toll-free number and email address for Tech support, which I did not need to use while preparing this review.

My favorite troubleshooting tip in the manual is “Make sure that there are no more than 63 devices plugged in and no more than 16 hops between any two devices.” Are we doing the Bunny Hop, or playing Hopscotch? Wow to somebody who has that many gizmos plugged into a computer.

NEMO GETS PERSONAL

Let’s pretend I have LaCie, EZQuest, and TDK CD-RW drives in front of me. Which would be my first choice? Each has unique attributes:

Weeks speaks:

I inserted TDK’s FireWire cable into my Titanium PowerBook running OS X v10.1.3. Apple System Profiler identified the drive in Devices and Volumes as a TDK 241040, as expected.

I placed an audio CD into my PowerBook, and after the disc mounted on my desktop I used veloCD’s push button to open and close the media drawer containing a blank CD-R disk. This drive has a smoother door action than the EZQuest Boa, recently reviewed here in MyMac.com.

Toast Titanium 5.1.2 for OS X recognized the TDK drive, so I chose COPY at 24x then WRITE DISC. The veloCD was quiet during “Filling RAM Cache,” then made gentle surging noises during “Disc-At-Once” operation. It’s much quieter than the EZQuest I reviewed. The burn sound changes slightly during the creation process.

The flashing blue light bar is cute, but distracting, like desktop sounds in the Finder. This novelty feature will soon wear off for me.

To test Burn Proof in OS X I ran four applications in the background, which didn’t bother Toast or the TDK. OS X is good about sharing processor work load. I used Unix’s command to check on CPU usage, which varied between 20 and 25 percent on my original revision one Titanium PowerBook.

My comment on veloCD’s noise factor is that the sound is qualitatively less objectionable than on the EZQuest drive. During playback to confirm all music copied accurately, I noticed the burner/player’s white noise was barely perceptible from eighteen inches distance.

My verdict is identical to Nemo’s: TDK’s veloCD is an absolute plug and play piece of hardware. Smaller and lighter than EZQuest’s Boa, I like veloCD’s appearance and fan-free features. Suggestions are limited to having the blue light bar pulse in time with music playback downbeats (totally impractical), and have the light bar be dark when not reading or writing (completely undesirable, from TDK’s point of view). Let Ôem burn!

MacMice Rating: 5 out of 5 in OS X.

Nemo’s MyMac.com “Q/D/S/V Standard” for all product reviews:

Q = QUALITY, including ease of installation, performance, stability, and general happy relationship with everything on my system;

D = DOCUMENTATION, both printed and electronic, plus appropriate website material;

S = SUPPORT, in the form of email, phone, and web updates;

V = VALUE, which includes both original cost and subsequent expenses

John Nemerovski