iRiver I/OMagic I5216C - CD-RW / DVD-ROM combo drive - IDE

List Price: $70.00

Customer Reviews:

Sleek Drive [Posted on 2004-01-10]
Installation was a piece of cake with this drive--just slide it into a slot, connect three cables and boot up. Windows 2000 recognized it instantly. (In fact, despite the documentation claiming that the drive is Windows only, so did Mandrake Linux 9.1, although the provided burning software was obviously Windows only) From start to finish, insallation probably took 10 minutes. I should note that the instructions mention that you may need to reconfigure your BIOS if the drive is not recognized and that they give no information on how exactly to perform this reconfiguration. However, I imagine that this probably only applies to older BIOS chips, so it would not likely be a problem on newer systems, and anyone who knows the difference between a master and a slave drive should have no trouble installing it (and if you don't you can still probably figure it out :-).

The drive comes with the Roxio Easy CD Creator 6 Basic and Roxio DVDMax player software, both of which are very intuitive and easy to use. However, while the technical specs claimed that only 20MB of hard disk space was required, the default install options ended up taking 126MB of space. Also, Easy CD Creator only supports burn modes up to 48x (which for that matter is also the top end for most blank CD-Rs). Nonetheless, the progress bar flies by and I've yet to have an error recording a disc.

Overall, I have no complaints. The drive is fairly quiet, responds quickly, burns easily, and even looks pretty sleek.

unacceptable support [Posted on 2004-03-16]
The purpose of this review is to inform customers of the poor service provided by I/O Magic. I had bought a problematic DVD drive. A technician suggested I acquire an RMA but subsequent attempts to do so were unsuccessful. After a couple of months of no replies, I decided to simply buy a new drive from another manufacturer which got rave reviews.

Stinks [Posted on 2004-08-26]
It wont read anything. They dont help me fix it. It doesnt work with NERO. Even with XP, my computer freezes up and stops working, which it didnt do before. Im not even making any of this up.

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