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Review of the Actima A44T 44X
CD-ROM Drive
 I
usually use Acer CD-ROM drives, but last week the vendor I was placing an
order with didn't have any. At his recommendation, I bought a couple
of 44X CD-ROM drives made by Actima,
a Taiwanese company I never heard of before. I was pleasantly surprised
by the quality of these drives.
The A44T is well-packaged in attractive retail box which
includes everything needed to install the drive except an IDE cable to connect
it to a secondary IDE port, which is typical. The other potential installation
problem is the audio cable. It has identical four-pin connectors
on both ends (see picture) and they may not be compatible with older sound
cards. Also in the box is a DOS driver disk, mounting screws, and a
fairly good, albeit brief User's Manual in English, German, Spanish, French,
and Chinese. The manual is printed on good quality paper, includes
diagrams of the front and back of the drive, hardware and software installation
instructions, and a few trouble-shooting Q&A's.
The A44T has a hefty "feel." It weighs
about 2.2 Lbs, has CD drawer which is a little more solid than some of the
flimsier ones I've seen on drives lately. The CD door is integral to
the drawer and has a gasket around the inside edge to keep out dust and to
keep in sound. The eject and play buttons on the front have a solid
tactile feel, like those on a high-quality calculator. The volume control
is firm without any wobble.
The only installation problem I had when installing these
drives in two computers over the last few days was caused by the audio cable. One
of the computers had an old SoundBlaster and no CD-ROM input receptacles
compatible with the plug on the cable. It was no big problem for me
because I have a big box of all sorts of audio cables in my shop, but it
will be a problem to some buyers. Other than that, installation was
really simple in both cases. ATAPI driver on the various flavors of
the Windows
98 Startup Disk recognizes the drive and brings it up for a quick Win
98 installation on a new system. After installing 98, I installed
the drivers provided on the Actima floppy by F8ing at boot-up to bring up
the DOS prompt and typing a:install. Windows 95 and 98 will then detect the
drive. With this procedure, the CD-ROM is also available when booting
directly to the DOS prompt.
OPERATION. This drive is fast and quite. Although,
you can hear the drive spin-up, it is very quite compared to others I've
seen (heard). You would think that one could work-out a proportionality
between a 44X drive and a 36X drive and the 44X drive would be 22% faster. Such
is not the case. Nor is a 36X drive 50% faster than a 24X drive. These
speeds are maximum speeds, not average data transfer speeds. Actually,
the A44T is about 8.5% faster than an Acer CD-936E/AKU 36X UDMA 33 drive. The
A44T moves 104 MBytes to a Western Digital UDMA 33 drive in 43 seconds in
a computer with a 400 Mhz K6-2 and 64 Mbytes of memory--that's fast. The
36X Acer drive moves the same data in the same machine in 47 seconds--that's
also fast. So, all of these X's don't mean a whole lot once a CD-ROM
has a UDMA interface and is 36X or greater.
FEATURES
- 44X maximum speed
- ATAPI/E-IDE interface
- Digital and analog sound outputs
- DOS, Windows 3.X/95/98/NT and OS/2 Warp compatible
- Complies with MPC III standard
- Supports PIO Mode 4 and UDMA 33
- Handles both 8 cm and 12 cm CD's
- Emergency manual eject
- Auto-speed switching for different disc formats
- Multi-read capable
- Data transfer rate: 6,600 KB/sec maximum (which doesn't
mean a whole lot either)
- Average access time: 100 ms (typical)
Actima also has a 50X version and CD-R/W drives.
Larry |
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