Bij cdrlabs.com is vandaag een review verschenen over de QPS Que! Fire CD-RW drive. Dit is een externe drive uitgerust met een FireWire interface. De drive is gebouwd rond dezelfde hardware als de bekende 16/10/40 brander van Plextor. Het moge dan ook een niet al te grote verrassing zijn dat hij qua performance bijna identiek is. Alleen qua CPU gebruik en DAE moet de drive zijn meerdere erkennen in de IDE brander. Volgens de reviewer is de QPS Que! Fire een goede keus als je op zoek bent naar een snelle externe FireWire fikker:
If you've read our past FireWire reviews you've seen that other than CPU usage the performance was almost identical between the FireWire and ATAPI versions of a drive. This was not the case with the QPS drive. While the FireWire to IDE bridge did not affect the data transfers it did have a high overhead when extracting audio. While in this case you might be losing a little speed when extracting audio you are gaining FireWire's easy installation and the ability to move the drive from computer to computer as long as they they have FireWire ports.
Is the QPS drive an option if you're in the market for a FireWire drive? While there are a few others on the market now, this is the only one I know of that uses the Plextor PX-W1610TA. If you want a FireWire drive based on the best 16x drive technology available the QPS is it.
The drive is very new so you may have a hard time finding it but it should be hitting major retailers shortly after you read this. The places I have seen it for sale have it for anywhere between $375 and $400. This puts it at the same price as most other FireWire CD-RWs. Other than the DAE hiccups and the fact that it does not have a lot of software support yet, it's a great drive. I think that once it gains the software support it needs it will be a good choice for Mac and PC users a like.