Yamaha is using this week’s CeBIT 2001 trade show to demonstrate its new CRW2200, which it calls the “world’s fastest series of CD-R/RW drives.” The new drive will be available in five models when it is released later this year, and offers 20x burn speed, 10x rewriting, and 40x reading.
The CRW2200 depends on Partial CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) recording to achieve its high speeds, much like its CRW2100 series siblings, said Yamaha. Partial CAV enables the drive to work at a constant and controlled rotation speed when writing to the inner tracks on the disk. Yamaha general manager Masami Takeuchi explained that Partial CAV enables the CRW2200 to reduce vibration.
The CRW2200 also employs SafeBurn, Yamaha’s implementation of buffer underrun protection, an 8MB caching technology which has been developed to reduce the likelihood that the drive will run out of data before the disc is finished burning. In the past, high-speed drives without such caching abilities have produced corrupted CD-Rs, or “coasters.”
The CRW2200 also utilizes Optimum Write Speed Control, which will automatically adjust the write speed for different discs, thus eliminating the need for users to manually adjust the write speed of the drive depending on the CD-R’s compatibility.
The CRW2200 is expected to be released in internal ATAPI and SCSI-3 versions; external SCSI-3, FireWire and USB 2.0 versions are also planned for release. The internal ATAPI configuration will be the first to see release, in the second quarter of this year. The other configurations will follow. Pricing for the new drive configurations was not announced.
CeBIT 2001 takes place in Hannover, Germany from Mar. 22 to 28.