Usability Tests – Using this drive as a portable recorder

The drive made our day several times the past two months! You can't imagine the pleasure of plugging it in at the USB interface, burning up those two large files that you just downloaded though your friends PC that isn't equipped with a CD-RW drive yet, and take them home with you. You don't even have to search for a spare plug for the power supply as the internal battery does it's job perfectly! Speaking about the battery, the maximum charging time is about 2h for a completely empty battery pack if you charge though the power supply and you don't use the drive in the meantime. The battery can be also charged though the PCMCIA interface, from the battery of your laptop! ;)

That of course may shorten the available battery time for the laptop itself, but it's still a possibility. Let's us note here that our own Fujitsu-Siemens sometimes couldn't stand the load from the laptop being powered though the PCMCIA interface and rebooted. That's when the little switch at the side of the drive comes in handy. With it you can force the Freecom to be powered from it's own battery than from the laptop one, which is something that solve our problem. The battery can also be charged though the FireWire (1394) interface, but we'll keep that for a future test...

With a fully charged battery, you can use the Freecom for about 2-3 hours of sporadic usage. We also wanted to check how many CDs would the Freecom burn in a row. We wrote the same CD-RW (650MB) with Nero at 4x DAO and as soon as it finished, we erased it and started over again. The maximum we could achieve was three successful burns and erasing. The drive would pass out having completed the 75% of the forth burn, after being used constantly for 1:20 hours. Quite a good performance for a small 1500mAh battery pack…

But here comes the second problem: How do you know if the battery power that you have left, is adequate for writing a CD, if it's not fully charged? The answer is you don't… A battery meter on the drive (or better, a software battery meter) is something that this drive really misses. It happened to us sometimes at least, when thought that because the drive was sitting there doing nothing, only having some little data read from it infrequently, that it would maintain it's battery state and right afterwards got a coaster.

Something else that could be useful in this situation would be a power saving mode, which the drive misses as well. The drive can't be turned off and stays on as long as the PC stays on. You can preserve the life of the battery a bit If you take advantage of the Hot Plug feature of the USB interface and unplug the drive when you don't need it, but the same thing isn't as easy with the PCMCIA interface and can't be done at all with the parallel port.

One last comment is about the little three colored led on the drive: The meaning of the colors change depending on the way the drive is connected to the PC and combined with the fact that there is a blinking and non blinking state with two of the three colors makes the user a little confused so he has to reach the manual (which is excellent) to get some explanation. Finally, we have to remind you that although the drive is a portable one, you shouldn't test it's portability when burning a CD because, as with all CD-R/RW drives, it's sensitive to vibration and a coaster can be created very easily.