Kenwood True-X 72X CD-ROM $54.99 + tax

[Strych9]

CompUSA has the Kenwood True-X 72X CD-Rom advertised for $79.99 ($99.99-$20 instant rebate). Pricematch with Staples and add a $25 off $75 coupon = $54.99 + tax w/free shipping. Good price if you like speed.

 

[madthumbs]

I have this drive, I wish I'd kept the old Acer 24x since on the average times are the same, and the Acer had better audio extraction.

 

[jayallen]

I sure like mine ... and I paid a bundle for it. Maybe I can justify another one? ;-)

 

[CitizenX]

IS the 72x better than the 52x... I have the 52x and when it works its FASTT but it has lots of quirks!

Any feed back?

I paid $100 for my true-x 52x over a year ago

 

[MortaniuS]

Nice price, too bad that drive sucks, only thing its good at is reading retail cds. Sucks horribly at reading cdrs. I am much more satisfied with my TEAC

 

[Strych9]

I don't have any experience with this drive. I just know a lot of people want it cuz of the speed so I thought I'd post the deal.

 

[Wingznut]

CitizenX, email or icq me. I'll tell you (or anyone else with a Kenwood 52x drive) how you can get Kenwood to give you a 72x drive for $30.

 

[CAK]

My 72X is working well for me. Reads copy's just fine as long as the CD is of decent quality.

 

[gr8snakee]

Long Live my Teac 540 40X Ide drive

 

[MSU]

I need to replace my dying cheapo 32x IDE CD drive. Comments so far appeat not so good on the Kenwood drive, but Teac seems to be the choice. Also, I'm thinking about buying my first CDRW soon and don't know if I should get SCSI or IDE. Can anyone help me with some questions.

1) Can you burn IDE to SCSI ok? Or should I get both SCSI drives? (Cost is a consideration.)

2) Those with the Teac drives, care to share a good place to get em?

Thanks.

 

[divinemartyr]

MSU,

Recently I believe it was either anandtech or one of the other review sites, posted a review of the Plextor 12x/10x both SCSI and IDE versions and they found that the IDE was actually faster than the SCSI and had no problem dealing with ANYTHING they threw at it. They were able to get the scsi drive to coaster on one of their torture tests, but were not able to do so with the IDE drive. If I were you i'd check out some more reviews, but from the looks of it, the IDE drives, with the increased bus widths of 66 mb/s and 100 mb/s have either taken over or equaled that of SCSI performance in terms of home use. When it comes to 7 hard drives in a raid array, you obviously want to go to with SCSI, but since price is a concern, IDE is DEFINITELY the way to go, no question!

divinemartyr

 

[MSU]

Thanks divinemartyr,

I just ordered the TEAC 32x SCSI CD drive (CD532S) after seeing a thread on it. Teac Thread

Does this mean I must buy a SCSI CDRW? That is, can I buy a Plextor 8/4/32 or 12/10/32 IDE CDRW and burn from the TEAC drive?

Sorry if that is a stupid question. Thanks.

 

[Sonic625]

The Compusa Kenwood looks to be Retail while the Staples is "Kenwood 72x Truex CD-ROM Drive OEM" Anyone know if there is a difference in drives and also has anyone actually tried to get this drive yet?
Thanks,
Sonic625

 

[Vette73]

The 72x is the best one as IT does read CDR's and works great. The 52x was a update to the 40x40 that could not do anything. If you have a 40x40 , kenwood got sued and said that if you send them the 40x40 they will test it and if it is bad(which I think they are all) they will send you a NEW 72x with a 1 year warrenty.
I found a guy that sold me a 40x40 and i just sent it off the other day.

 

[popeye44]

just my .02 there is a firmware upgrade for the 72x and since i put it in i have not failed a read on ANY cd i have put in it.. i have a panasonic and a plextor scsi burner ones a 4x the other a 12x and the 72x reads them flawlessly the only cd i ever had failure with was diablo 2..
after firmware this was also fixed. if you want a FAST drive this is the one.. at a very good price.

 

[Wingznut]

I recently picked up a Toshiba 48x CD-ROM from a local PC shop, for $44. It's the best CD-ROM I've ever owned. I have yet to put anything in it, that it couldn't read (cd-r's included), and it's real fast. I copied 600+ megs of music (that I previously burned to a cd-r) on to my hard drive in about 6 minutes. Real nice CD-ROM.

 

[cremefilled]

Toshiba & Teac certainly make nice CD-ROMs, but the Kenwood could go through 600 MB of music in maybe 1'20". That's fast enough that it's not even worthwhile dubbing straight to CD-R; just copy it to hard drive first to be safe. However, I've heard that the Kenwood may have trouble with scratches. Btw, most recorders are great at reading scratched media.

MSU, I'm sure you realize that many of the people on this forum are pretty hardcore computer enthusiasts. If you're asking "what's the best CD-R drive," everybody will tell you the Plextor 12X. But if you haven't even bought one until now, I would expect that your use is going to be infrequent. I might recommend instead getting the Plextor 8X/4X/32X (at buy.com with coupon), or even one of the $100 bargains you can find other threads about (providing that the drive supports CloneCD). Also, the Plextor is famous for its "burnsafe" technology (I think that's the name; basically a large buffer), but most recording software also has its own configurable cache. E.g., if you use CDRWin set to 8-12 MB of cache, you should never have a buffer underrun problem.

SCSI to IDE won't be a problem, although it's not an advantage either, like SCSI to SCSI is.

 

[Kwad Guy]

Actually, Plextor isn't famous for "their" burnproof technology.
They simply license the technology from Sanyo, as do a number of
other CDRW manufactuers (TDK, Iomega, etc.) And burnproof isn't
just a large buffer. It's a method to allow the burner to pause
when the data stream underruns, and to resume burning when the
data stream fills up again.

I have played with "all" the highly-rated IDE CD readers,
and bottom line is that I've found they all have achilles heals of
one sort or another. In my opinion, none matches the Plextor 40X
SCSI drive for overall performance plus ability to handle various
media, various defects, etc. However the Plextor requires you
to install a SCSI card, which many people do not want to do...

The Kenwood 72X is terrific for factory produced CDRs (best of
any drive), and for factory produced music CDs that are in near-
perfect condition. It is pretty bad for damaged CDs/CDRs and
so-so for most home-recorded CDRs/CDRWs. At least in my experience.

Oh, and if you decide to use a SCSI Plextor 40X, be sure to use
the standard 50-pin version, NOT the ultra-wide version. The firmware
on the current 40X is much better than that on the ultra-wide for
DAE extraction...(And the firmware on the UW version cannot be
upgraded to the version used on the current 40X 50-pin).

Kwad

 

[divinemartyr]

I went ahead and ordered mine today, I could only find a $20 coupon instead of $25... the $25 one expired on Oct 27. I've been looking for this drive for quite some time now and saved about $20! Thanks!

Quick question, I know most people on this forum swear by the Plextor 12x CD-RW drive, but I'm looking at the TDK 12x VeloCD which also has burn proof technology. It has a few more features than the Plextor, most notably 24x audio extraction with the ability to extract a 3 minute song in only 8 seconds. I think, coupled with the other features, would make it a good buy at about the same price as the Plextor. Any ideas where to find a review on this drive? I've had no luck yet.

divinemartyr

 

[dafatha00]

is this the drive that has 7 lasers reading simultaneously? i read that kenwood made something like that

 

[Len]

I'm about to check out the new firmware for this drive, but as of now I'm having tons of trouble reading CDRs and CDRWs and even retail discs with scratches in them. On the other hand my phillips dvdrom, acer cdrw, and creative cdrom all have absolutely no problems with the same discs. For example, a cdr backup copy of windows 2000 advanced server shows up as and audio cd with one track which starts playing on autoplay. You would think this is an extrem example, but some cdrs don't even show up as being readable. Poped the same CD into the other drives and absolutely no problems. I even installed the OS from my acer cdrw to make sure. Ran a peice of software that verified the copy was identical to the original. Tried it on different OSes. Win 98SE, ME, and 2000AdvSrv all show up similarly from this drive. I don't see this being a defective drive since it has absolutely no problems reading retail discs and a few cdrs. I frankly regret spending the money on this drive since I only need enough speed to be able to do on the fly copies at 12x without buffer underrun. I was stupid enough to forget to check turn on DMA mode for my previous cdr and forgot about it, so I constantly got buffer underruns. That pretty much led me to buy the Kenwood drive, which when it works is great.

Oh yeah I forgot this drive is the fastest thing I've ever seen for reading retail CDs, but I hardly have any of those laying around.

 

[ss284]

Does anybody know a good place (online) to get a reliable, decently fast, compatible CD-rom drive at a reasonable price?

I know thats a lot to ask, buy i can hope right? =)

Thanks,

steve

 

[wjones]

I'm using this drive. Good for burning CD to CD without copy an image to your hard drive. I paid around $70 for this.

 

[cremefilled]

ss284, look for the Teac 40X IDE drive at pricewatch. It's about $35, and this is widely regarded as one of the best drives around.

 

[Aboroth]

The Teac 40x 540E drive is just awesome. Quite a fast CDROM with really fast access times. Definitely worth the $40 that I paid for it.
Remember to upgrade the firmware and get the utility for it from Teac's website to get the most out of it if you decide to get it.
I got mine from buy.com just a week ago.