TEAC’s drive comes stock with an interface card and a skimpy user manual, but the drive is Win 95 Plug-and-Play compatible, so installation was quick and hassle free. There’s really nothing special about the drive’s general construction. Front-panel features consist of a headphone jack and volume control. If the drive had front-panel controls for
than TEAC’s claimed 125ms average access time). These numbers were significantly better than the rest of the field. But that performance came at a heavy price in terms of CPU utilization: The TEAC required a whopping 56 percent of the CPU’s clock cycles to play video.
Should you buy this drive, we hope your installation was easy as ours, because TEAC provides only the skimpiest of user manuals, their telephone tech-support line is available only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
PST, and their Web site consists of an “Under Construction” banner. Still, you can’t argue with performance, and if the unit serves you faithfully until you’re ready to move up to a 12x drive, a DVD-ROM drive, or even a new PC, it’s a worthwhile investment.
playing audio CDs (forward, reverse, pause, and play), we might have given it a higher rating because it delivered such excellent CD-ROM performance during our benchmark tests.
The CD-58E turned in a superior average data-transfer rate of 796K/sec, with an average access time of just 116ms (better
PRICE: S199.00
URL: www.teac.com
