[paranoia] Cyberdrive

[Malte Uhl]

First of all, I'm not exactly happy with recommendations noone has asked
for. Secondly, I own one myself and like add my comments:

- it noisy as in NOISE
- it is not 100% jitter free
- when things get rough (scratched cds) the performance detereorates
rapidly.

I, too, bought this drive because it was recommended by c't magazine,
usually a very reliable source for product info. First of all, there were
3 Cyberdrive models (40x, 44x, 48x), the Plextor UltraPlex 40x and a
couple of others. The 40x and 48x drives seem to be identical except for
the speed. The 44x model is a very different beast. It was the 44x that
performed best of all in this test. The UltraPlex was only rated average,
mostly because of its performance ripping scratched CDs, since that was
what the test focused on.

I have both drives in my PC, side by side. From my experience the Plextor
outperforms the Cyberdrive in every aspect, including scratched CDs. It's
less noisy, or at least the noise is much more pleasant to the ear. It's
also much faster with all kinds of CDs, data, pristine and scratched
audios. It also does infinitely better with badly centered CDs.

The reason why the Plextor got only a mediocre rating was its odd(?)
behaviour at unreadable sectors, that is sectors deliberately made
unreadable by black dots of sticky tape on the test CDs. While all the
other drives I know will return a sector full of noise, klicks, etc. in
such a case, the UltraPlex simply returns no block at all as if there
was a dropout. The measure by which c't magazine jugded the drives
obviously puts more weight on dropouts then broken sectors.

I respect everyones opinion on how a drive should behave. My opinion is
that I want a perfect copy of a disk, otherwise I would not be using
cdparanoia in the first place. cdda2wav is much faster because of less
error checking. But then, I have yet to find an unscratched CD where the
Plextor makes cdparanoia barf. Well, one might ask what the point of using
cdparanoia is then...

Oh, and yes: I have used the Cyberdrive 48x with native IDE and SCSI
emulation configured. It is a very good drive at its price, which is only
half of the Plextor, but I think the UltraPlex is well worth its money,
eg. when and where did you get the last firmware update for your
Cyberdrive (or any other drive for that matter)? Plextor offers updates
on a regular basis with the firmware actually improving.

I keep writing too much in my emails.

Malte

>Over half a year ago I went out to buy one for myself. At that point I had
>experience ripping with Plextor SCSI drives (albeit older models) and knew
>how crappy IDE-Drives could be. I finally found one which I can
>wholeheartedly recommend :
>
>     CYBERDRIVE 48x
>
>This drive has _excellent_ CDDA capabilities. It is very fast and rips

--- >8 ----
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