An Insider's Account

The TDK CyClone 48x24x48x Internal drive we received was a complete engineering sample and according to our lead in TDK, this will be what the retail version would end up to be. Besides sporting the new 48x writing speed, the CyClone also features an incredible 24x re-writable speed - although as of press time, no 24x CD-RW media is available yet in the market, and TDK wasn't able to supply us with one in time for this review. Meanwhile, let's take a look at what you can expect to find in the retail box before we scrutinize its important features.

The drive comes with an IDE cable, audio connector and a pin to eject the drive's tray (if there is a need to).

Basically, everything in the package will not be any different from past TDK CD-RW drives. You'll still get the CD-R pen, TDK Digital MixMaster software, a 48x CD-R and manual. TDK have also opt to include the more user-friendly Nero Express in place of the more advanced Nero Burning Rom. The bad news here is, TDK will only be shipping a 12x CD-RW disc instead of the 24x version with this drive.

Full Constant Angular Velocity

While most drives that supports the CAV writing technology were only partial (hence P-CAV), we can see from the specifications table in the previous page that the CyClone writes at both partial (24x-40x) and full CAV (48x). So what's the difference between partial and full Constant Angular Velocity? Just look at the two pictures below.

With full CAV, the disc is read/written at a constantly increasing speed.

As the name implies, with P-CAV the disc is being read/written at an increasing speed until a certain point. After this point the speed will not increase anymore and remain constant at this speed.

SMART-BURN Buffer-underrun Protection

Featuring SMART-BURN (or Smart Monitoring & Adapting Recording Technology for BURNing) technology to prevent buffer-underrun errors, the TDK CyClone drive is intelligent enough to know how to resume from the point it stopped burning due to buffer under-running. In addition to that, SMART-X (Smart Monitoring & Adjusting Read-speed Technology for Extraction) is an optimum write speed control feature that checks the media's highest speed capability before deciding what speed it should write on the media, so as to produce the maximum quality result.