Today we post three (3) new reviews. This time we examined the newest TEAC readers (CD-552E, DV-516E) and an external USB2.0 writer from AOpen... TEAC CD-552E: For all those who still consider a good CD-ROM drive as a "desktop essential", Teac offers a new solution for reading at a high speed of 52X. Although the in our latest hardware reviews we had to do with high-end CD-R/RW and DVD recorders, we could not resist testing the new CD-ROM drive from Teac. The performance of the drive is compared with the already tested CD-ROM solutions from Samsung, Mitsumi and Cyberdrive.

-TEAC DV-516E: TEAC decided to enter the DVD market for PC with a new DVD-ROM proposal, the Teac DV-516E. The multifunctional drive supports 16X DVD-ROM reading among with 48X for the CD-ROM/R media. Whether TEAC decided to enter the DVD market as well or not, testing this new product is definitely interesting for all the candidate buyers and the fans of the optical storage technology.

-AOpen EHW-4048U: Many manufacturers ship external drives mostly based at USB2.0 connection interface, since it offers increased portability among with easy installation. The EHW-4048U is a fast drive from AOpen that includes all the features that competition offers (40X writing, 12X re-writing, 48X reading) in a very attractive price. We compare it with other USB2.0 solutions in order to test whether the AOpen drive can stand the tough competition.