PC Magazine -- April 9, 1996

Hewlett-Packard Co.: HP SureStore CD-Writer 4020i

James Karney

The HP SureStore CD-Writer 4020i is a bargain among CD-R drives. Aimed squarely at the budget-minded, small-volume user, this $1,249 kit (about $1,000 on the street) includes a 4X-read/2X-write drive, a special AdvanSys ISA host adapter, and a suite of basic authoring, indexing, and viewing applications. Produced by Hewlett-Packard's Colorado Memory Systems division, long known for mass-market tape drive kits, this offering has few frills. But while the 4020i may not meet every need, the price/performance ratio hits the mark.

The internal drive has just basic controls on its front panel: an eject button, volume knob, headphone jack, and lights for power and operation. It is based on Philips parts, using a tray rather than a caddy design.

If you plan on using a third-party adapter rather than the included AdvanSys model, think again. To maintain a consistent test-bed for all the machines, we tried to hook the drive up to our Adaptec AH-2940 card. Since the installation routine looks for the bundled card, some workarounds and manual settings were required to get things running, much to our chagrin. And when we finally did get it running, performance was poor (thanks to a DMA conflict between the supplied adapter and the rest of the system settings), and buffer underrun errors were plentiful.

Setting up the drive with the bundled host adapter, as most entry-level users would, is hassle-free. With the 4020i mounted on its own card (and with our hard disk and a Plextor 6X CD-ROM on the 2940), performance picked up dramatically and the buffer underruns stopped. The backup-related tasks in our test suite were executed in good time, especially for a 2X recorder: The drive completed the On-the-Fly Recording test in just under 28 minutes.

HP ships the unit with a custom edition of Incat's Easy-CD; you also get Easy-CD Audio, Incat's Magic Lantern for viewing Photo CDs, and IMR's Alchemy personal indexing package. The products operate only with Windows 3.1, but HP says Windows 95 versions are under development.

Creating backup sets of data on the fly was easy using Easy-CD: Choose the files, run a speed test if desired, and burn the disk. The Alchemy indexer is a nice touch, allowing you to produce full text databases with simple-to-use queries and the ability to run right from the new CD-R platter. Audio creation is less elegant, since Easy-CD Audio will work only with existing .WAV files. Hence, we could not directly copy tracks from a music CD. The Magic Lantern Kodak Photo CD viewer is just that, a viewer. You can't author a new Photo CD with it. The bundle has no provisions for authoring Photo CDs or Enhanced CD (CD Plus) disks, or handling non-ISO or DOS file formats.

The 4020i is a bargain for users who want a CD-R backup solution, and is limited more by its software than the hardware design. If you want more features, the money you save can be applied towards more robust authoring tools.

HP SureStore CD-Writer 4020i. List price: $1,249. Hewlett-Packard Co., Loveland, CO; 800-810-0134, 970-635-1575; fax, 970-667-0997. http://www .hp.com/go/storage_support.

Suitability to Task

                    Power     Ease

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