TEAC Ships the First 8×24 CD-Recordable Drive

TEAC is now shipping an 8×24 CD-recordable drive, the fastest CD burner on the market. The SCSI-2 unit writes at 8X (1,200KBps), reads at 24X (3.6MBps) with a 150ms average access time, and pulls audio off a disc at a 12X extraction rate for disc-to-disc copying.

Both versions come as complete kits with the full install package: a bus-mastering PCI SCSI host adapter from Adaptec plus a bundle of Adaptec software. The internal model, the CD-R58S, carries a $449 MSRP; the external CD-RE58S is $549. Not cheap, but at 8X a full disc burns in around nine minutes, and that kind of speed makes the price sting a little less.