Installation

As with most IDE drives now installation is simple. We installed it as secondary master by changing the jumper on the back (which was originally set as slave). The drive was detected in Windows XP without any problems.

Auto insert notification was enabled but we disabled it by changing the registry key "KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Cdrom/Autorun=0". DMA is normally successfully turned on by default if Windows XP can detect it.

Nero InfoTool 1.01 is a good general all purpose tool that will report a drives capability's to you. Above you can see that it is reporting that the Read speed is: 32 x and write speed is 12 for CD-R disks. The drive has a 2MB buffer. You can see that it also can not read DVD-RAM disks but it wrongfully reports that it can't read DVD-R & DVD-RW disks. The write features reported by the program is accurate and as it can only write to DVD+RW & +R disks as well as CD-R & CD-RW disks. We were disappointed to find that the drive did not support the Mount Rainier format.

Philips sent us an April 2002 manufactured European model that came shipped with firmware version 1.13. We managed to obtain an unreleased (at the time) firmware version 1.29 directly from Philips.

The software we used for this review was: DiskJuggler 4.01.1002, NERO 5.5.9.0, Record Now Max 4.1 & CloneCD 4.0.1.10.

As you can see overburning is supported (for increasing your CDs capacity by a few meg.), as is buffer under protection. Philips calls it Seamless Linking (it doesn't need software support for it to function properly and has smaller micro gaps so it is a better than burn proof). CD-Text and DAO/96 is also supported -- and as reported by InfoTool the 2MB buffer is also displayed.

Next we examined the drive with the latest version of DiscJuggler:

The above screen shots are from DiscJuggler 4.01.1002, its device tab investigates the drive and now you can see a few other features are revealed such as "pseudo write" which is a simulated record function. Accurate DAE, RW sub-codes and verify are also reported as being supported by the drive.

Page 2 - Last Updated: 25 July 2002