24X FireWire CD-RW Drive from CenDyne

It must be External Drive Day. Along with receiving news about a new USB 2.0 HDD from Maxtor, we were also informed about CenDyne's new External FireWire 24X10X40 CD-RW drive. The new hot-swappable drive gives you 24X CD-R write, 10X CD-RW rewrite, and 40X CD-ROM read speeds on Macs and PCs. CenDyne says the drive provides transfer rates of up to 400 Mbps - up to 30 times faster than USB 1.0. connections - and will write an entire 650MB disk in as little as four minutes. The FireWire interface lets you daisy chain multiple FireWire devices so that you only need a single IEEE 1394 port. The drive comes with CD-R media, an IEEE 1394 interface cable and an AC power cable. It will be available in mid-August at a suggested retail price of $299.