detail information

In this part of the review we'll take a look at the Yamaha CRW3200E's CD-ReWriting abilities and its Mount Rainier (CD-MRW) support. For the packet writing tests we used Ahead's InCD version 3.28.0 and for the CD-MRW tests we used SAI's WriteCD-RW! Pro version 3.04.

Packet Writing:

We formatted a Mitsubishi Chemicals 650MB CD-RW disc which was delivered with the Yamaha package. We used InCD to format the disc and noticed that the drive has two write methods to choose from:

Yamaha CRW3200E InCD Page Settings

The drive has an option to use the 'CAV' write method instead of the normal 'CLV' method. CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) means the write speed is gradually increased and CLV (Constant Linear Velocity) means the drive uses a fixed write speed and doesn't change it. Also note that the option 'Format disc to CD-MRW' (Mt. Rainier) has been disabled in the screenshot. We will do the CD-MRW tests with a different software package and get back to this later.

In the table below we compare the achieved write times to other drives we've previously reviewed. For the re-write tests we created a file folder containing various files and which had a total size of 400MB (419.742.820 bytes). For the Yamaha CRW3200E we've measured both the CLV (standard) and the CAV write modes:

As you can see the Yamaha CRW3200E performs very well in both write modes. Strangely enough the write times in both the CLV mode and the CAV mode were the same. We tried several times but got the same result every time. Which mode should you use? Well as we see it, it doesn't make a lot of difference but we're not sure if there was something wrong with our system or perhaps with InCD.

Mount Rainier Tests:

The Yamaha CRW3200E is one of the first drives to support the 'next generation' packet writing format, Mt. Rainier. In this part of the review we'll test the Yamaha's Mt. Rainier (CD-MRW) abilities and compare them to two other drives which also support this format, the Mitsumi CR-480ATE and the TEAC CD-W540E.

If you want to read more on the CD-MRW format and our test method please read our Mount Rainier article. In the table below you can see an overview of the achieved results:

As you can see in the table above we experienced some problems with the Yamaha CRW3200E drive. When we tried copying our 304MB test folder containing various files it constantly crashed. We discovered that the Yamaha choked on very large files (20MB+) and crashed the system. We tested the same discs with the TEAC CD-W540E and Mitsumi CR-480ATE drives and they could write the data without problems.

Conclusion:

The Yamaha CRW3200E performs very well with CD-ReWriteable media and is the fastest drive we've reviewed, compared to other 10x CD-RW recorders. It was a little slower when formatting the disc when using CloneCD but not much. Unfortunately we had a problem when using InCD and the Yamaha's CLV and CAV write method. Normally the CLV write method should be faster than CAV but in our case the write times were the same.

The Mt. Rainier (CD-MRW) abilities of the Yamaha CRW3200E definitely need some more tweaking. The drive could write the disc without problems when using smaller files but crashed when using data files bigger than 20MB. We did the read test from a formatted disc by first copying the data using a different recorder, waiting until it had finished formatting and inserting it back into the Yamaha drive.

On the next page we've summed up our tests results with various media...