To test the CD-R I tried burning a few CDs. I'm not going to name any titles, but I tried copying a few games, a few audio CDs, and backing up some files.

 

Copying games: DAO

Trial 1: Easy CD Creator. failed. This was expected because the CD-R does not support DAO.

Trial 2: FireBurner. failed. This was expected because the CD-R does not support DAO.

Trial 3: CDR-WIN. failed. This was expected because the CD-R does not support DAO.

 

Copying games: TAO

Yes, at first I was trying to use DAO (disk-at-once) recording. Since the CD-R does not support DAO recording, copying games is nearly impossible. TAO (track-at-once) could get the job done, but there would be several problems. Here's what happened when I tried copying another game, using TAO:

Trial 1: Success. This worked, but there were no audio tracks. You really need DAO for this sort of operation.

Trial 2: Success. This wasn't of much use either, because afterward it still asked for the CD. Again, no audio tracks.

Trial 3: failed. I found a way around writing the audio tracks directly, but the program still failed to work. This time, the CD never initialized correctly. Another coaster for the pile...

 

Copying audio CDs

Trial 1: Success

Trial 2: Success

Trial 3: Success

Copying audio CDs is no problem for the writer. No CD-R should have problems with this. In fact, it was also fairly quick. The average time @ 4x was about 20 minutes.

 

Backing up files from hard drives

Trial 1: 140 files, 1 MB to 10MB each: Success

Copying several 1 MB to 10 MB files proved to be a breeze. Let's move to something more realistic...

Trial 2: 1530 files, 100 bytes to 13 MB each: Success

This is what backups are really like. Writing 1530 files to a CD was not a problem at all. This is perfect for backups.

Trial 3: A 600 MB .ZIP file and a 10 x 5 MB MP3s: Failed - buffer underrun

Writing enormous files like this can often be a problem with CD-Rs.

 

Benchmarks

Average record time for 650 MB @ 4x (including TOC -table of contents): 21.2 minutes

Average record time for 74 minutes of audio @ 4x: 20.6 minutes

Average record time for 650 MB @ 2x: 41.3 minutes

Average record time for 74 minutes of audio @ 2x: 39.3 minutes

 

Overall, the CD-R was fast and stable. Only 1/9 trials led to a buffer underrun.. not bad. The cause was probably something on my computer. The biggest complaint I have about the 4801TE is lack of DAO. If you plan to copy games or other CDs with audio/data on one CD, you'll need DAO, so look for another CD-R