Thursday, January 25, 2001

Introduction AOpen is a manufacturer known not only for the manufacturing of motherboards, but also of a wide array of multimedia products that are seldom offered by its traditional competitors. In fact, the only manufacturer to even approach AOpen's sheer range of offerings is Asus. In this article, we'll be taking a look at AOpen's new CRW-1232, a CD-RW drive capable of speeds of 12X when writing in CD-R mode, 10X in CD-RW, and 32X when reading CD-ROMs.

Description

Clearly, AOpen didn't hold back any effort in designing the CRW-1232. In fact, as we'll discuss later on in the article, the successor to the CRW-1232 - the CRW-1232A - possesses just about every refinement and feature one can imagine.

JustLink

JustLink technology is a recent addition to the CRW-1232A version of the CRW-1232 drive that we'll be testing here. This technology is very similar to Burn-Proof in concept, save for the fact that JustLink uses gaps of only 2 microns , compared to the 40 microns gaps used by the Burn-Proof technology.

What is JustLink are you asking? That's pretty simple. Essentially, when a user makes use of the system for other tasks while the drive is in the process of writing, it is possible that the writer's memory buffer will find itself empty due to the hardrive's inability to supply it with data. Normally, this causes a momentary stall in the writing process, disrupts the flow of data as it is imprinted on the CD, and can effectively render it useless. Contrary to hardrives, CD-ROMs are written-to in a single, continuous manner, and it is in this format that CD-ROM drives expect to find the disk's data when they access it. So, if that single, essential writing process is disrupted due to an empty buffer, the entire process up until the point of the data-stall is rendered void.

To avoid this situation, manufacturers have often taken to installing very large buffers is their CD-Rs and CD-RWs, and have developed technologies which help them take advantage of the increased memory.

Justlink is an example of one such technology. What it does, is constantly verify just how much data is available in the buffer. If the amount of available data falls below a certain point, the drive is temporarily halted until such time as the buffer is re-filled. It's at this point that a small link is made in the CD, in order to mark the physical area at which writing should resume. In this way, writing can continue as normal, and the disk itself can be read without problems.

Unfortunately, the CRW-1232 that we received for testing is not equipped with Justlink technology, but rather a slightly older tech known as OPC that is far from being as efficient as both Burn-Proof and JustLink. We'd thus advise readers to make especially certain of the model they buy - and to purchase the Justlink-equipped CRW-1232A rendition - if they are truly after the best of the best.

Next: The specifications.