Pacific Digital is not a high-profile company. From what I’ve seen, it focuses on providing very reasonably-priced equipment that can save you as much as 50% off the big-name prices. That makes it my kind of company. Similar drives can cost $180-$200, but at my favorite computer store, Sam’s Club, this one cost $108. It even includes a PCI USB 2.0 card to add a USB port to your desktop computer, if the computer doesn’t already have one built-in (most don’t, yet). So the price was good, but only if the drive performed well, which we shall explore further.

One of the rationalizations I used to justify buying this CD burner is that I needed one to use with my Hewlett-Packard notebook computer. That computer only supports USB 1.1, but like all USB 2.0 devices, the Pacific Digital is backward compatible with USB 1.1.  So I could use the same drive with both my notebook computer and with my desktop computer, just by plugging it into the appropriate USB port.

When I unpacked the drive, I realized that my choice may had a teensy miscalculation. This CD burner is huge! It’s almost as big as the notebook computer, and may weigh as much. Oh, well, I may not be carrying the drive with me on trips. I tried it out anyway, and just as I had predicted,  Windows XP recognized the new drive, installed necessary drivers (off the hard drive), and then fully supported the drive, thanks to Windows XP’s treating CD burners as native drives. That means you don’t have to install special software, either. You may still want to, since like all the features that Microsoft builds into Windows, CD burner support tends to be rather basic. For example, if you want to create MP3 music files, you’ll need a separate program or an add-on (for an additional cost) to Microsoft’s Windows Media Player.

Connected to my notebook computer, the Pacific Digital CD-burner worked like a champ. I copied some graphics files to CD, which completed pretty swiftly, even though the drive supposedly drops back to 4x speed with USB 1.1. But it’s a well-known fact that CD speed ratings are rather optimistic, being slower near the start of the disc (the inside) and reaching the fastest performance near the outside of the disc. Of course, unless you have enough data to fill the disc, you’ll never see the drive perform at its rated speed.

Next came the acid test: connection to my one of my desktop computer’s USB 2.0 ports. The same initial installation sequence occurred: the computer recognized the new hardware, installed drivers, and rebooted. After that, the drive appeared as a new drive letter and I could read and write to a CD-ROM — in fact, the same one I had started on the notebook computer. But there was a distinct difference — the read/write times were dramatically faster. So apparently USB 2.0 really is the big deal that the press is making it out to be. Whether it is as fast as its competing high-speed connection, FireWire, I’ll leave to the big magazines with computer labs to evaluate.

The Pacific Digital drive obviously is intended for use in a real-world environment. As you can see from the photo, it comes in a black and yellow ruggedized case, with lots of rubber padding and grooves to make it easy to grip. Although a 24x drive speed is rather average today, it’s still quite fast. Like all fast CD burners, the Pacific Digital drive includes circuitry that prevents buffer overrun, which until recently was the curse of the CD burner, and probably the leading cause of fatal error in burning a CD.  

Unlike the Zip drive I recently reviewed, this Pacific Digital drive has an external power supply, something else to lug around. I had hoped it would draw power from the USB bus, like the Zip drive does, but I suppose the CD burner requires more power than the very limited capacity of the USB bus. A switch on the back lets you turn the drive off when it’s not in use, which won’t save you any power, of course. A headphone jack and volume control on the front of the drive led me to hope I could drop in an audio CD and listen via headphones, but that didn’t seem to work. 

If portability were a true issue for me, I would probably select a much smaller drive, like one of Iomega’s Predator, which weighs 1 1/8 pound. That would cost $210 at the company store (maybe less elsewhere), but there’s a $30 mail-in rebate offer as I write this.

For $108, the Pacific Digital X-treme-24 Re-writable drive seems like a real deal. Check out their web site, or contact them at 2052 Alton Pkwy
Irvine, Ca. 92606; telephone (949) 252-1111.