While most of the new drives from Sony arent exactly what wed call Extreme News, there are a few things wed like to bring to your attention.

Lets start with the CRX 75A. Slated at an October 1 ship date this is an 8x4x24 portable CD-RW drive. While the hubbub states that the interface is PCMCIA, our guess (mathematical, logical, and, of course, opinionated) is that the connectivity is actually Cardbus. Anyone who has attempted to use a 4x CDR/RW portable on a laptop, has seen that PCMCIA 2.x (ISA technology) has seen its day. With an Average speed of 9-11x read speed, the data transfers drop Well below 8x during recording, not accounting for OEM installed TSR (terminate, and stay resident) programs to enhance your computing experience and software you may be running to keep you safe on the road.

The next Big Thing from Sony is the CRX 1600S/E, a 12x8x32 that is Sonys introductory product in the CDRW High Speed market. Selling by Sept 1, this drive will hit the market amid much industry controversy.

This drive will beat Yamahas current shipping 8x8x24 performance. OK. So what? Plextor, and Ricoh have already announced their 12x10x32 drives. The Plextor is currently available, and the Ricoh will be available at the beginning of September.

The next big hurdles for Sony will be that the Ricoh, and Plextor drives are ATAPI, much more affordable than SCSI2, and both of Sonys competitors are advertising in-hardware technology to prevent buffer underruns. In the case of Plextor they are using B.U.R.N. (Buffer Under RuN) proof Technology, from Sanyo, which guarantees a constant stream of data to the CDRW. Ricoh has developed their own dedicated streaming data process they call JustLink. Nothing like these technologies are mentioned in any of the news releases about the Sony CDRW High Speed drive.

The Specs

– CRX 75A- PCMCIA interface (Cardbus??)

– 8x/4x/24x

– 8MB buffer

– Thickness 15 mm and mass 200 g

– CRX 1600S/E

– 12x/8x/32x

– 4MB Buffer

– SCSI2 interface