CyClone CD Revo CD-RW 32X/10X/40X (PC)

CNET editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.0 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Gene Steinberg
• Reviewed on: 06/26/2002

The CyClone CD Revo FireWire CD-RW is designed for lugging from computer to computer for home or office backups. Its makes a good first impression with its easy setup, convenient carrying handle, and reasonable price. But the drive's so-so write performance and external power brick reduce its practicality.The CyClone CD Revo FireWire CD-RW is designed for lugging from computer to computer for home or office backups. Its makes a good first impression with its easy setup, convenient carrying handle, and reasonable price. But the drive's so-so write performance and external power brick reduce its practicality.

Partial portability
The $219 CyClone CD Revo says portable with its carrying handle, but it's only partially so. The silver-gray case has transparent sides, weighs four pounds, and measures 11.75 inches long by 7 inches wide by 2.5 inches tall, which makes it lighter but not smaller than its competitor, the EZQuest Boa FireWire CD-RW drive. Some of that weight was simply transferred to the external, 13-ounce power brick, which gives you one more thing to carry--or forget. The CyClone CD Revo features a Sanyo mechanism that sports Burn-Proof technology, a buffer-underrun-protection scheme that lets you burn a CD while multitasking yet not lose data. We tested a 32X/10X/40X PC model of the drive, but the CyClone is available in a separate Mac version and in speeds of up to 40X/12X/48X.

In spite of the documentation's sparse guidance, the CyClone CD Revo's setup process was very easy. A single, eight-page foldout sheet describes the simple process of installing the supplied CD-writing software (Nero 5.5 comes with the PC model, Roxio Toast Lite 5.0.2 with the Mac) and plugging the drive into a FireWire port. The CyClone CD Revo comes with a FireWire connection cable, and it's compatible with FireWire-enabled PCs using Windows 98 SE or later and Apples with Mac OS 8.6 or later. The supplied version of Toast isn't compatible with Mac OS X. If you're using the last OS, you'll need to buy a copy of Toast Titanium or use Apple's built-in CD-burning feature or iTunes.

Speeding CyClone
The CyClone CD Revo performed acceptably overall in CNET Labs' tests. It excelled at digital audio extraction, ripping a 27-minute track in only 52 seconds. During packet-writing, the CyClone was the best of a mediocre pack, taking 10 minutes, 17 seconds to write 400MB to CD-RW. But in the audio-burn test, it finished more than 1 minute behind the EZQuest and QPS drives, making it a poor choice if you want to create audio CDs on CD-R. All the drives installed Microsoft Office 2000 Small Business Edition in about the same amount of time. Continue reading

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