PCExtremist has a brief look at a new series of Yamaha CD-R/W drives that promise to fill a standard CD-R in 5 minutes. In addition, Yamaha claims the drive can rip CD audio at 40X meaning converting a CD to MP3 should take about 3 or 4 minutes with this system. Add to that 10x speed for writing to a CD-RW and what’s not to love?
Well the price for one thing — the only place I could find pricing and availability information was Amazon.Com which reports the internal IDE version will be available on November 24, 2000 and retail for $399.95. Ouch. Maybe next Christmas.