Fantom ships 16x FireWire CD-RW

Fantom Drives has announced the release of its new FireWire-based CD-ReWriteable drive. The drive writes CD-Rs at 16x, writes CD-RW’s at 10x, and reads CDs at up to 40x. Fantom says the new drive utilizes a mechanism built by Plextor Inc., and is the fastest product in their CD-RW line.

Fantom Drives said the new 16x CD-RW burner is “burn-proof.” The Plextor-built mechanism uses an implementation of Sanyo’s BURN-proof technology. It features buffer under-run hardware, reducing the likelihood that users will have problems burning CD-Rs at high speeds. Fantom claims that the drive will burn a full CD in under 5 minutes, and can manage to fill a 650MB CD-RW in about six minutes.

Buffer under-run technology is designed to make drives less susceptible to failure caused by slow source disks or background processes running on the computer — CD-R burners require a steady and uninterrupted stream of data in order to write effectively to the CD-R. In the past, high-speed drives without such buffer under-run hardware ran the risk of burning “coasters” — useless discs that were ruined because the data couldn’t get to the drive in time.

The drive ships with a FireWire cable, blank CD, and Adaptec/Roxio’s Toast mastering software. The drive includes a one-year warranty, two FireWire interfaces on its backplane, a headphone jack, and dual RCA stereo analog outputs.

The new FireWire 16x10x40 CD-ReWriteable Drive from Fantom Drives is available from retailers worldwide and from mail-order companies. The drive carries a suggested retail price of US$459.