HardwareZone.com heeft een review gebouwd van de Yamaha CRW2100E-VK IDE burner. Deze drive schrijft op 16X en herschrijft op 10X. De leessnelheid van CD-ROM's is 40X, maar in de test komt de drive niet verder dan 32X. Ook het rippen van Audio-CD's worden de specs (40X) van Yamaha niet gehaald: 21,5X is het maximum. De CRW2100E beschikt niet over Burn Proof technologie, maar heeft wel een 8MB buffer.
The Yamaha CRW2100E-VK is currently the fastest IDE-based CD-RW drive available today. Its ability to consistently read data at a high point of 32x shows that it may be also one of the fastest readers for a CD-RW drive currently.
Furthermore, burning a standard CD-R disc at roughly 2100KB/sec is very fast. You must ensure that you use HS CD-R media for your burns as the Yamaha CRW2100E drive utilises partial CAV for writes above 12x; this means that if your media has a low speed rating, the drive will adjust speed according to that media. One other setback we noticed throughout our tests is that the drive has a very loud whirring noise when reading at high speeds. We had expected something like that to happen (most high-speed drives are noisy) but the sound is still annoying sometimes.
At S$378, the Yamaha CRW2100E drive is a good buy as the Yamaha's CRW8824IX costs over S$690. So if you're on the lookout for an E-IDE-based CD-RW drive that doesn't burn holes in your pocket, the Yamaha CRW2100E-VK is a must-have fast CD-RW drive.