ASUS CRW-4012A-U: High Speed Mobile Burning

Construction

The design of the ASUS 4012A-U was fairly similar to any other drive on the market.  A small green LED on the top of the unit denotes whether or not it is actually on.  Other than that, it is essentially a CRW-4012A IDE drive inside a USB housing.  At a little more than 3lbs, the contents of the packaging should include:

The first thing you may notice was the included vertical drive mount.  While this is definitely a nice looking feature, we ended up not using the vertical mount.  Standing on its side with the specially designed stand, the footprint of the 4012A-U was 4”.  Laying flat like a typical drive, the device sits on a 7” footprint.  The very small increase in desk space did not justify the problematic pain of very carefully keeping the media on its side while loading.

All cabling and adaptors were provided by ASUS.  Keep in mind though a 2.0USB card is not included.  If you plan on purchasing the ASUS CRW-4012A for an older laptop without USB2, you must purchase a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card, or your drive will be rendered almost useless.  We will get into more detail about USB 2.0 later in this article.

The rear of the burner revealed an on/off switch, a USB 2.0 connection, and a 12V DC input.  For an external device, this was all fairly familiar.  As with most external CD drives, we saw a complete lack of digital out audio.  The front of the device housed a small microphone jack with volume control.  The 4012A-U is not a high fidelity audio device, and while the internal IDE version of this drive has digital out provisions, the USB device does not.

Another “gotcha” this drive presented to us was the lack of sensitivity in the drive tray.  It takes a pretty good shove to get the drive to respond to any sort of recoil.  The preferred method of closing the drive is put the CD in the tray, reach around and depress the button.  If you plan on using the drive vertically, this is not a very simple task and requires 2 hands.  Maybe it is just a personal preference, but a pressure sensitive CD tray would have gone a long way for this product.