MCE Technologies has a new 16x version of their Lucid Portable FireWire CD-RW Drive.
The Lucid-16 16x10x24x Portable FireWire CD-RW Drive is compatible with all FireWire equipped Macs, as well as those with PCI FireWire cards that supply power to the FireWire bus. It’s compatible with both Finder burning and Apple’s iTunes under Mac OS 9.1 through Mac OS X.
The drive, due Feb. 1, burns recordable CD-R discs at 16x speed and re-writable CD-RW discs at 10x speed, while reading CD-ROM discs at 24x speed. The CD-RW measures less than 5.5 by 6.5 by 0.8 inches and weighs less than a pound.
The Lucid-16 also features JustLink buffer underrun protection to prevent the creation of defective CDs from interruptions in the flow of data to the drive, according to Arnold Ramirez, MCE president. Since it’s bus-powered, you don’t need an AC adapter to run it. However, you will need an adapter (available separately) when using the drive with a system that has FireWire ports that don’t supply power to the FireWire bus. This is the case with some CardBus-based and PCI-based FireWire cards.
The Lucid 16x10x24x Portable FireWire CD-RW Drive is bundled with Roxio Toast CD-recording software, a FireWire cable and a user’s guide. The retail price is US$399; the optional universal AC adapter is $14.99.