JVC Personal Archiver, JVC CD-R Direct

Jon Hill

JVC Information Products Co. of America

The JVC Personal Archiver ($1,195 list, $995 street) isn't flashy or fancy, but it was one of the more versatile and reliable packages in this roundup. Granted, the Personal Archiver software has a clunky interface that shows its DOS-based roots, and the 2X-read/2X-write JVC XRS-201 drive mechanism seems fairly pedestrian in an age of 4X drives, but the combination proves the old adage that slow and steady wins the race. The company's other offering in this roundup, the CD-recording system JVC CD-R Direct ($1,195 list, $1,000 street), pairs a clever backup utility with the same XRS-201 drive, but this system pales in comparison with more robust bundles in its price range.

Both packages include an Adaptec AHA-1510A SCSI controller, cable, and terminator, along with EZ-SCSI software (Version 3.1), a CD caddy, and two blank disks. The Windows-based setup procedures were simple and straightforward; installation of CD-R Direct and Personal Archiver proceeded without incident. Personal Archiver requires an A/V-rated SCSI hard disk, but CD-R Direct can use an IDE drive to write its temporary files.

The Personal Archiver software was able to negotiate nearly every task that we threw at it, but it does have its share of quirks. For example, each partition on your SCSI hard disk must be labeled using DOS's LABEL command or Archiver won't be able to see it. It performed fairly well for a 2X drive on the On-the-Fly Recording test (22 minutes 44 seconds). We were unable to create a bit-for-bit image copy of a commercial CD. But we were able to create several advanced CD types that other drives couldn't: multisession Photo CD, Enhanced CD (CD Plus), and CD-audio disks from .WAV files and pre-recorded CDs. One minor complaint: The software is somewhat obtuse and it hides physical formatting issues from the user. To make a CD Plus disk, for example, you select "Track at Once," write the audio portion as a "Single Session," then append a data session (choose "Multi Session, Aggregate"). You can not specify that the data track on the CD Plus disk that you are creating needs to conform to the CD-ROM XA Mode 2, Form 1 format, nor can you simply choose CD Plus from a list of CD types.

The less flexible CD-R Direct lets you treat a blank CD-R disk like a write-once floppy disk. The software lets you assign a drive letter to the CD recorder, after which you format the disk and simply copy files to it using Windows' File Manager or DOS copy commands. Once you finalize the disk, it can be read on any CD-ROM reader, but disks-in-progress are accessible only via the device driver. We were able to create on-the-fly backups with the CD-R Direct, but the unit was excruciatingly slow: When paired with the CD-R Direct software, the JVC XRS-201 completed our On-the-Fly Recording test in just under 40 minutes--almost twice as long as the same mechanism took using the Personal Archiver software.

Compared with other bundles in the review, the CD-R Direct package falls a bit short. The JVC Personal Archiver CD-Recording System was among the more reliable systems we saw, performing as advertised on test after test and offering support for a wide range of CD formats. The premastering software is a bit kludgy, but the reliability makes the drive a good business workhorse.

JVC Personal Archiver. List price: Internal version, $1,195; external version, $1,295. JVC CD-R Direct. List price: Internal version, $1,195; external version, $1,295. JVC Information Products Co. of America, Irvine, CA; 714-261-1291; fax, 714-261-9690.

Suitability to Task

                   Personal Archiver   CD-R Direct
                    Power     Ease     Power     Ease

Initial startup     Good      Good     Fair      Excellent
Backup              Good      Good     Good      Excellent
Disk duplication    Good      Good     Good      Good
Format flexibility  Good      Fair     Fair      Fair

Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company