In the fall of 1999 Toshiba announced the world's first combination CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. This drive, called the SD-R1002, was truly a breakthrough. Finally, consumers would no longer need to choose between a DVD and a CD-RW drive. They could now get it all in one.

When I tested Toshiba's SD-R1102 a few months ago I was impressed with the quality of the drive. However, I found myself wanting more when it came to the drive's features and performance. This is where the SD-R1202 comes in. The SD-R1202's speeds are faster across the board and has features the SD-R1102 was lacking like buffer underrun protection, UDMA 33 support and the ability to write CD-Text.

The SD-R1202's CD reading performance was hit and miss. When reading pressed and CD-R media, the drive had no problems reaching 40x in our tests. When reading CD-RW media it was a different story. The SD-R1202 was able to barely exceed 20x with those discs. The SD-R1202 was also pretty slow when it came to ripping audio CD's. Like some of Toshiba's other drives, the drive did not do very well in our DAE quality tests. However, I think much of this is due to the benchmark programs themselves and not the drive.

As a writer, the SD-R1202 had no problems completing our writing and rewriting tests and its buffer underrun protection worked quite well. I'm still trying to figure out why Toshiba chose to use Z-CLV technology when writing at 16x. Using CLV technology probably would have shaved a few more seconds off the drive's writing times.

I was very impressed with the SD-R1202's DVD performance. The drive had no problems reaching 12x when reading both data and movie DVD's and was pretty quiet to boot. I also found that the drive had no problems reading DVD-R, DVD-RW or DVD+RW discs. I have not found many DVD-ROM drives, let alone a combo drive, that can do this.