Out of Sync

OWC 24x10x40 Plextor FireWire CD-RW: The Sweet Smell of Speed and BURN-proof Technology - Part Three

Product: OWC 24x10x40 Mercury Pro Oxford911 Plextor FireWire CD-RW Drive
Company: Other World Computing
Web: eshop.macsales.com
Contact: sales@macsales.com
Category: Hardware, data storage, and backup
Price: $299.95
Requirements: 233 MHz PPC G3 processor, Mac OS 8.5.1 or higher, FireWire drivers and interface, CD ROM, 100 MB free hard disk space (for Toast Titanium)
OS X Plans: N/A
Rating: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

Ratings Legend
One Bounce: Lustless	This product is uninspiring and not only lacks lust appeal, but it also lacks even the possibility of lust-production.
Two Bounces: Lack-Luster	If you need what it is that this product does, look elsewhere or wait, it lacks lust-appeal.
Three Bounces: Lustworthy	A few rough spots here and there, but overall a high quality item worthy of lust.
Four Bounces: Pure Lust	Unalloyed lust.

This is the final part of a three part review of the OWC 24x10x40 Mercury Pro Oxford911 Plextor FireWire CD-RW Drive. In part one, I basically wanted to give all of you Applelust readers that might have been looking for one heck of a stocking stuffer a heads up to what appeared to be a fantastic product. In part two, I discussed some of the hardware specifics and my experience with using the drive with Toast Titanium. In this final review, I will discuss my experience with using this drive with Retrospect Express, and assign the drive an overall rating.

I have always thought that for backup I would use CD-RW (rewritable) media as opposed to CD-R (write once) media; being able to reuse the media of a prior backup made perfect sense. For this reason, once I obtained Dantz's Retrospect Express 4.3 ($16.95 from OWC when you purchase a qualified drive such as this one) I bought some off brand GQ 10x CD-RW media, and ran some tests. GQ, by the way, stands for Great Quality. Don't know if you have had the experience, but way back in grade school, I went door to door selling the "World's Finest Chocolate" brand of candy. Somehow, there is something about the brand name of a product containing a superlative being a clear indication that the product itself is not. I have had quite a few coasters with the GQ discs, most definitely due to defective media, and not due to buffer overrun errors. Again, I do not fault the Plextor for this one bit (no pun intended). In fact, the recommended Verbatim discs supplied with the Plextor have all burned perfectly.

To compare the write and read speeds of CD-R vs. CD-RW media, I first burned a 655 MB Toast Titanium disc image using the HOTAN 24x CD-R media mentioned in part two. I was able to burn the disc in 4 minutes and 10 seconds, and verify it in 2 minutes and 29 seconds. To confirm the actual write and read speeds, I compared the ratio of the speeds (24x/40x) with the ratio of the times (2:29/4:10) and they did in fact check out:

24x/40x = 0.6

2:29/4:10 = 0.6

So, since Toast Titanium believes that it is writing the disc at 24x, we can assume that Toast Titanium is able to read the disc at 40x. Given that, I wrote and verified the same 655 MB Toast Titanium disc image using the GQ and the Verbatim 10x CD-RW media. In both cases, I was able to burn the disc in 8 minutes and 17 seconds, and verify it in 3 minutes and 7 seconds. Note that it took longer to verify (read) the CD-RW media than it did to verify the CD-R media.

Given that the HOTAN CD-R media was written at 24x and read at 40x, we can calculate the speeds for the GQ and Verbatim CD-RW media:

24x*4:10/8:17 = 12.1x (speed of writing 655 MB w/GQ and Verbatim CD-RW media)

40x*2:29/3:07 = 31.9x (speed of reading 655 MB w/GQ and Verbatim CD-RW media

Note that these values are for comparison only, as there are non media related factors (such as load and seek time) that come into play. But, as a result of these tests, the primary realization that I came to was that if you are going to spend top dollar for a Plextor drive, and if you are going to use it for backup, which means that you are likely going to use it on a daily basis, then why use it most of the time with both its write and read performance hobbled by CD-RW media? This argument is compounded by the fact that CD-RW media costs about three times that of CD-R media. Besides, would you really want to throw away an old backup when a CD-R disc can be had for as little as 25 cents? And, do you really want to inventory two different kinds of media, CD-RW for backups and CD-R for audio discs? Remember that most audio CD players cannot read CD-RW media.

For all of the above reasons, I decided to use CD-R media for my backups, and effectively ignore CD-RW media in its entirety. It is 24x40 for me, all the way.

And so, it was onward to Retrospect Express.

The Plextor performed very well with Retrospect Express, once I got over the first of many Retrospect Express obfuscations. When I first installed Retrospect Express and started it up, I was told that "no supported backup devices were found." I had the Retrospect 4.3 Driver Update installed, so what was wrong? I figured that it was a Toast Titanium extension conflict, and spent quite a bit of time juggling FireWire extensions in an attempt to get the Plextor working.

Well, it ends up being that the "4.3" in the "Retrospect 4.3 Driver Update" is not the version of the driver update, it is the version of Retrospect that the driver update updates (trying saying that three times fast). So, the very first thing that you need to do when you get Retrospect Express for use with this drive is to make sure that you have no less than version 2.4.103 of the 4.3 driver update installed in the same folder as the Retrospect Express application itself (the driver update is not a Mac OS system extension). If you do not have at least this version (the copy on the Retrospect Express CD-ROM that I received from OWC contained version 2.1), you need to go to the Retrospect web site, download the latest Retrospect 4.3 Driver Update, and place it in the Retrospect Express Folder, pronto.

(Note: While installing version 2.4.103 of the 4.3 driver update resulted in Retrospect Express recognizing the Plextor 24/10/40, and while the drive is listed as supported for Windows on the Dantz web site, the drive is not yet officially listed as supported for the Mac.)

Once the driver update was installed, the Plextor performed admirably, and I was rewarded with high performance backups and restores. Though I found Retrospect Express riddled with counterintuitiveness, I soon looked the other way and got all warm and fuzzy knowing that all versions of the files are kept in a backup set, i.e., that Retrospect Express is not a disk mirroring application. This further supported my decision to use CD-R media; basically, once you start using Retrospect Express, you can have all versions of everything that you have ever done in backup. I plan to keep adding to my backup set for quite some time, say, until my CD case fills up (50 discs), at which point I will store them away in an old cakebox and start over.

Which brings up two additional very important points that Retrospect Express sadly obfuscates.

First of all, while your supplied Retrospect Express CD-ROM is set up to act as a startup disc in the event of a catastrophic failure of your hard disk, recall that that disc contains the wrong version of the driver update. SURPRISE! Were your hard disk in ruins, you would not be able to access the Plextor drive by simply starting up from the Retrospect Express CD-ROM that Dantz has supplied you. This means that in the event of you being unable to startup from your hard disk, you would not be able to startup Retrospect Express from the CD-ROM and backup your hard disk to the Plextor before proceeding. You would also not be able to access the Plextor to do a restore. Oops. How did that one slip through the cracks?

Secondly, even when you tell Retrospect Express to backup all of your files with the "All Files" selector, Retrospect Express doesn't. That's right, it does not backup all of your files, in that it does not backup the catalog, i.e., the "index" to your backup set, which is kept on your hard drive, typically within the Retrospect Express application folder. The logic of this omission is that the contents of the catalog is not known until the backup operation is complete, but surely there are ways around this, e.g., the catalog could always be the last file written on the last disc of the backup set.

Logic aside, the dire consequence of this omission is that in the event of a catastrophic failure of your hard disk, you will be forced to recreate the catalog of the backup set by feeding each and every disc of it into Retrospect Express, after which you will have to feed each and every disc in again in order to perform the actual backup. If your backup set is physically distributed over a large number of discs, this could take you hours upon hours huddled in front of your Plextor in a stressed out condition feeding discs into it like a trained monkey.

Two problems, two solutions.

You can solve the first problem by creating a copy of the Retrospect Express startup disc capable of accessing the Plextor. While there are a number of ways of doing this, what follows is a description of how to do it with Toast Titanium. Follow this procedure after you have both Retrospect Express and Toast Titanium properly installed and operational with your Plextor drive, but before you have any hard disk problems:

(1) Open Toast Titanium.

(2) Create a temporary Toast Titanium 650 MB partition.

(3) Mount the original Retrospect Express 4.3 CD-ROM.

(4) Drag the Retrospect Express 4.3 icon from the desktop to the temporary partition. The temporary partition will now contain a folder by the name of "Retrospect Express 4.3". Dismount the original CD-ROM, and double click on the folder to open it.

(5) Replace all of the copies of the file "Retrospect 4.3 Driver Update" with the version contained in the Retrospect Express Folder on your hard disk. There are a total of eight copies, two in each of the language folders.

(6) Open the System Folder within the Retrospect Express 4.3 folder.

(7) Drag the following files from the Extensions folder within the System Folder on your hard disk to the Extensions folder within the System Folder within the Retrospect Express 4.3 folder, replacing the two files that are there:

(a) FireWire Enabler
(b) FireWire Support

(8) Drag the file "FireWire Authoring Support" from the Extensions (Disabled) folder within the System Folder on your hard disk to the Extensions folder within the System Folder within the Retrospect Express 4.3 folder (if you are using Toast Titanium, this extension will have been disabled as part of the Toast Titanium installation procedure).

(9) Click on the Data window of Toast Titanium, and select Mac OS as the disc type.

(10) Drag the Retrospect Express 4.3 folder to the Data window. If you have followed this procedure, the System Folder is already blessed.

(11) Burn the disc.

(12) Test the disc by starting up from it and seeing if you can access your Plextor drive.

You can solve the second problem (the tedious recreation of the catalog of your backup set) by simply creating a second backup set. In this backup set, you would use the selector "Retrospect Files." This is the easiest (if not the only) way to get Retrospect Express to backup a catalog file. That is right, if you labeled the catalog "Hot" and then used the "Hot Items" file selector, Retrospect Express would not backup the catalog. Like I said, obfuscating.

While this second backup set will not contain its own catalog file, it will contain, among other things, the catalog file of your primary backup set. Every time that you perform a primary backup, perform this secondary backup immediately afterwards. Setting up a separate Retrospect Express script for each of the backups makes this a simple and straightforward procedure to follow. Now, in the event of a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, you can easily retrieve the catalog of your primary backup set by simply recreating the catalog of this second, much smaller "catalog" backup set, and then restoring the primary backup set's catalog from it. Hours upon hours saved, greatly reduced stress level.

So, how does all of this add up in the eyes of this reviewer?

The OWC 24x10x40 Plextor FireWire CD-RW is a wonderfully crafted, high quality device that is a joy to use and just oozes quality. It performed splendidly in all of its tests. The only potential downside for some might be the constant fan noise, but since I only turn on the drive when I am actually burning a disc, that factor does not bother me one bit, and if that is the price of speed and reliability, so be it. The OWC 24x10x40 Plextor FireWire CD-RW costs more than other drives, but you are clearly paying for quality, reliability, performance, and Retrospect compatibility. If you have the extra cash to burn and a lot of discs to burn as well, you will be well pleased. Highly recommended.

- Charles Sorgie

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