When I first unpacked Micro Solutions' Backpack cd-rewriter, I was more than a little surprised by the "portable" CD-RW drive I saw before me. It's not that the sight was unfamiliar--far from it. There I held in my hands a barely reconstituted Yamaha 4260tx CD-RW drive, with Yamaha's familiar beige-and-blue 4x2x6 identifier on the front and Micro Solutions' Backpack label on top.

It's a fine drive to be sure. We've reviewed one 4260-based bundle in EMedia, Optima's Diskovery CDWriter bundle [See February 1998, pp. 72-74--Ed.], and an external SCSI 4260tx has been an office standby for at least a year. Though perhaps a somewhat long-in-the-tooth reader these days, with the latest generation of 4X writers boasting read speeds of 16-24X, that kind of speed is wasted on external drives hooked up to notebook PCs (the PCMCIA and parallel connections just can't handle the throughput). And with snazzy 32X MAX internal drives abounding in today's PCs-to-go, who'd use an old recorder for reading anyway?

But I digress. Knowing Micro Solutions' reputation for reducing CD-ROM drive footprints to scarcely the big toe of a typical desktop external, imagine my surprise at seeing, not Micro Solutions' typical bantamweight stick-and-mover, but a comparably Sumo-sized contender in its place. Especially after two heady weeks of being regaled with promises of a fast-emerging era of portable CD recording--and even seeing a non-working prototype of Hewlett-Packard's forthcoming Discman-sized CD-RW drive--I expected smaller things from portable pioneer Micro Solutions.

size isn't everything

Portable CD-R is certainly a cool idea, but I'm not so sure the best expression of that idea is the ever-shrinking external that was almost as good for CD-ROM traveling shows as the peerless, but pricey, internal that's standard-issue with today's notebooks (DVD-ROM-packing portables included). CD-R has always been a chancier proposition than CD-ROM. Let's be conservative and say your CD-R on-the-go ambitions are limited to placid hotel-based burns, like those of a record producer who called me a year or so ago and said he was heading to Europe to record shows for a Rolling Stones live album and wanted to be able to give Mick and Keith freshly burned discs to sample the best bits from each night's performance (the Glimmer Twins being a tad DAT-phobic). Who's to say you'll have a stable desk in every port, where you can count on reliably stationing your CD recorder without fighting the phone and Gideon's Bible for available real estate? Or that just as likely, you'll end up burning on the nightstand, bed, or ironing board?

That's just best-case, considering that some hypers of road-ready CD-R are claiming you'll be able to conduct your recording business on planes, trains, and automobiles. Granted, the CD recording experience has mellowed over time, but it doesn't take a great leap of the imagination to see these slimline units sending us careening back into the technology's more high-strung past.

So maybe Micro Solutions has the right idea, sticking to Yamaha's sturdy design and altering it only through the company's trademark parallel connector for optical drives with the handy printer pass-through for portable users who also lugged a printer along on their journey. Granted, you'd still be better off hawking tie-dyes, patchouli, or plain old cassette tapes if you could time-warp yourself back and follow the Grateful Dead burning boots on-the-fly with this thing, but the Backpack cd-rewriter may well boast king-of-the-road credentials that its pint-size fellow portables don't. When (or should I say if) PC notebooks arrive with internal recorders installed, the circle will be complete and interim fixes like Micro Solutions' offering or even flashier entries like HP's will certainly seem less enticing.

But there's another selling point here in today's market that may be less obvious. With ever-more-clever cloning and the advent of cut-rate processor

chips like Inters Celeron, desktop PCs have plummeted to price points few ever imagined for systems with the power they promise. But the more some things change, the more other things stay the same, and notebooks have clearly been the last to benefit from this price erosion. For many business users, especially in the self-employed camp, a $2,300 Toshiba Tecra notebook is all the PC they can afford, and they frequently find themselves clearing the tumbleweeds from their home-office desktop when they return from their travels. So like iMac users with those chancy USB recorders, a working parallel drive like the Micro Solutions Backpack may be these itinerant professionals' only shot at availing themselves of the wonders of CD-R.

a full backpack

As surprisingly stately as the Backpack cd-rewriter is, Micro Solutions manages to stuff a satisfying bundle into its modest box, including a CD with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 3.5 premastering tool and DirectCD 2.0 packet-writing software, plus a floppy bearing software drivers for Windows 95/98/NT, a QuickStart installation guide, a date cable, and power supply. Unsettling as disconnecting your printer may be, connecting the drive is a piece of cake, and the ease with which the printer connects to the port marked "PRINTER" on the back of the drive is reassuring (as is finding that your printer still works).

Beyond the bundle, the drive offers all the pleasing amenities of the Yamaha 4260. The front panel offers a modest light show, featuring indicators for power on and read/write activity, plus a headphone jack for playing audio CDs with the drive. A custom power cable connects to the back of the recorder. An empty cavern in the back of the drive is covered with a plastic strip bearing the message "Remove to install sound option." This feature was not tested in the evaluation.

the rewriter for the record

An earlier Backpack offering from Micro Solutions met with mixed results in performance testing [See Ron Gustavson's Backpack Bantam review, February 199B, pp. 81-B2--Ed.]. Like many external CD-ROM drives designed for use with notebook PCs--both parallel and PCMCIA interface models--the Micro Solutions readers have transferred data at considerably lower speeds than their advertised 8X-12X. For most types of applications and stored data, the parallel connection simply can't offer the throughput required to guarantee that kind of performance.

Predictably, when connected to an Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) or IEEE 1284 parallel interface, the Backpack rewriter's read function--a solid 6X in SCSI configurations of the same Yamaha mechanism--is far from a 6X reader. Read data transfer rates averaged around 3X-4X (450-600KB/sec), and audio extraction was practically non-existent. Given the typical circumstances in which this recorder will be used, such remedial reading can be counted somewhere between minor and irrelevant. Anybody at this level of portable computing won't be using a 6X reader for playback--much less a parallel port recorder that shouldn't be expected to deliver that kind of read-back throughput in the best of circumstances. To put it bluntly, that's not what the Backpack is for.

Writing is another story. The Backpack rewriter was tested on two PCs, a 166MHz portable and a 333MHz (Celeron) desktop system. When recording data of various types from a pre-built image on a partitioned hard drive, using the bundled Easy CD Creator software, the Backpack cd-rewriter only underran once at 4X. Attempted writes of full-length and nearly full-length audio discs and datasets of other types cued without pre-built images proved less successful at 4X; more often than not, downshifting to 2X (and in one case on the 166, 1X) was required to record discs reliably. Discs successfully recorded with the drive held up well in playback fidelity tests on a variety of CD-ROM drives, and audio discs on three different audio CD players.

DirectCD worked fine with the Backpack rewriter as well, recording effectively to CD-R and CD-RW discs with simple drag and drop. After re-initialization, data was rewritten to a CD-RW with DirectCD as well. One Sony-branded CD-RW disc was used in testing; one or more CD-R discs each from Taiyo Yuden, Kodak, Ricoh, and Maxell were used in testing the drive's recording capability. The Backpack rewriter proved no more finicky than the Yamaha 4260 or any other derivatives when it came to writing successfully to a wide array of media types.

key to the highway

So maybe the Backpack cd-rewriter doesn't resemble the portable CD recorder of your dreams. It doesn't look like mine either. On the rare occasions that I blue-sky such things, a portable CD-R drive that looks exactly like half the desktop recorders in my office doesn't send me to cloud nine.