New Drive Doubles as a Cd-rom Player and a Removable-storage Device.
Kristina De Nike
Reviews Storage and CD-ROM Drives
UNLIKELY TO WIN the heavyweight title as either the fastest CD-ROM drive or the highest-capacity removable drive, Panasonic's new PowerDrive2 LF-1000AB nevertheless packs a few good punches as a hybrid device. The switch-hitting PowerDrive2 works both as a quad-speed CD-ROM drive and as a phase-change optical drive, and with two drives in one, it's more compact than two separate drives would be and uses only one SCSI ID.
What It Doesn't Do
It's probably just as important to mention what the PowerDrive2 does not do as to say what it does. It uses its own proprietary optical media, 650-MB PD cartridges, which cost $59.95 each. It doesn't work with other optical media. It's neither as fast as a SyQuest drive nor as inexpensive as an Iomega Zip drive, and you can't use it instead of a CD-R drive, because only the PowerDrive2 can read the PD cartridges. But it's easier to set up and use than a CD-R drive, and you can write to and overwrite the PD cartridges several times.
When you insert a CD-ROM into the PowerDrive2 tray, the drive works just like any regular CD-ROM drive. The CD-ROM software that ships with the drive is minimal, consisting simply of a driver and the CorelSCSI Audio utility, which lets you use the drive for listening to audio CDs. The PowerDrive2's speed is squarely in the middle of the range for 4x CD-ROM drives. You might want to consider adding a third-party CD-ROM program such as FWB's CD-ROM ToolKit or CharisMac Engineering's CD AutoCache to improve its speed.
To use the PowerDrive2 as a removable-storage device, you load a PD cartridge (about the size of a CD caddy) into the CD-ROM tray. The cartridge appears as an icon on the desktop. Once you've initialized and configured the cartridge with the bundled CorelSCSI Tools, you can use drag-and-drop to move files to it, as you would to any mounted volume.
The PowerDrive2's driver software has an annoying quirk: CorelSCSI Tools must be open whenever you mount a cartridge. If it's not, you get a message asking you to initialize the cartridge, as if you'd inserted an uninitialized floppy. But if you try to use the Mac Finder to initialize the cartridge, you'll get a dialog box telling you that the cartridge is locked -- whether it is or not. If you want to use the cartridges for automated backup, you will also have to buy a backup application, such as Dantz Development's Retrospect.
Slow but Stable
Writing to a PD cartridge demonstrates both the pluses and the minuses of optical media. Like those of most optical-media drives, the PowerDrive2 mechanism does a second pass after it's written data to the cartridge to verify that the data was written correctly. You can turn off the verification, although we recommend leaving it on, because we'd rather have an undamaged backup than a small improvement in speed. In our tests, the PowerDrive2 was about as fast as current optical drives; about half as fast as SyQuest, Bernoulli, and Zip drives; and one-third as fast as a Quantum 1-GB hard drive.
Depending on your removable-backup needs, the PowerDrive2 is either a bargain or a luxury at today's prices. For the same $995 that buys you the PowerDrive2, you could buy a low-end 230-MB optical-media drive and a 4x CD-ROM drive separately. But for those who need 650 MB of removable storage, the PowerDrive2 costs less than a high-end 650-MB optical drive alone. And other vendors that will be selling the PowerDrive2 under their labels are expected to price it even more competitively.
Panasonic has a strong commitment to the PowerDrive2 and has solid plans for its future. The company has an internal model of the PowerDrive2 and at press time was finalizing agreements with vendors of Mac-compatible products to offer the PowerDrive2 as an option. Panasonic also plans to create a PowerDrive2 with a Super Density drive that can read the Super Density CD-ROMs, expected in the near future. They will hold 5, 9, 10, and even 18 GB of data on a single disc. There are also plans for a PowerDrive2 jukebox, a CD changer, and a WORM (write-once, read-many) version of the PD cartridge. And in about a year, the Panasonic drive will be competing against a similar CD-ROM/optical-media drive from Sony and Philips, which might spur competitive pricing.
The Bottom Line
As convenient as it is to have both a CD-ROM drive and an optical drive occupying only a single SCSI address, the PowerDrive2 is unlikely to usurp the position of SyQuest or Zip drives as an industry standard for removable media because of its cost. But as production ramps up in the coming months, prices for the drive, as well as for its cartridges, will probably drop to more-competitive levels -- at the same time as Panasonic keeps it on the cutting edge of new technology.
Panasonic PowerDrive2 LF-1000AB
Rating: (3.5 out of 5 mice) Average/Very Good
Price: $995; 650-MB PD cartridge, $59 (list).
Pros: Removable-storage and CD-ROM drive take up a single SCSI ID.
Cons: Slow. Proprietary cartridges.
Company: Panasonic Communications & Systems, Secaucus, NJ; 800-742-8086 or 201-348-7000.
Reader Service: Circle #408.
Innovative and convenient, the Panasonic PowerDrive2 LF-1000AB works as both a CD-ROM drive and a phase-change optical drive, so you get dual functionality at a single SCSI address.
