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

Conclusions

ASUS has done a good job in bringing its CRW-4012A model burner to the USB bus.  As an after market product for laptop owners, the 4012A-U delivers good performance but with a few trade offs.  The first trade off on this product is price.  The suggested retail for the 4012A-U is 129USD.  If your laptop doesn’t support USB 2.0, you will have to get an adaptor card for another 50USD as well. For some, this may be a bit much to be spending on a CDRW drive.

We had several issues with the drive, including its lack of tray sensitivity, loud whine, and misleading seek time.  Even with FlextraLink, we still would have liked to have seen a larger buffer.  Most competing drive on the market right now are shipping with 4MB or higher buffers to minimize the necessity for features like BurnProof and FlextraLink.  While ASUS is off to a good start, we think they have a little ways to go before becoming market leaders in the CDRW sector.

However, if you intend to maximize the life of your older laptop, or simply want a solid performing external CDRW drive without resorting to SCSI, the ASUS CRW-4012A-U might be a reasonable choice.  The drive supports virtually all formats except Mount Rainier, and delivers the 48X burn as advertised in Z-CLV mode.

As ASUS takes a good stab into the USB market with its CRW-4012A-U, it continues to develop more products.  Stay tuned as we continue to review more optical storage products including DVD+RW/-RW drives and an upcoming look at the newest 52X write drives on the market!