Octave DVD Copy Master II 5
Overview
Reviews: HardwarePros:
Industrial sturdy design. Lets you copy onto 4 DVD/CDs at the same time. Reliable data duplication.Cons:
User interface can be tedious and buttons not comfortable or user friendly. Case is too large and noisy.The Octave DVD copier put to the test, is it easy to use? Worth the price?
The Octave DVD/CD Copy Master II has many features to make it distinctive enough from other DVD and CD recorders that come with your new PC, but the bulky design, noisy fan and lack of technologically innovative features prevent it from turning heads among a crowd of digital pit-burning peripherals. The CM II version we tested included one dvd-rom drive, 4 DVD+-R/RW/CD drives, a 160 GB hard drive and an LCD panel.
The strength of Octave’s CM II is its industrial-strength copying features. These include integrity testing, simulating data onto a disc before copying and comparing two discs after they are copied to ensure consistency. There are other utilities that let you scan a disc for content, such as counting the number of tracks on an audio CD. The ability to partition the mammoth 160 GB hard drive is a useful and important function as you are likely to load and copy the contents of various CDs and you may want to refer to them in the future. As with any hardware that allows you to load and store data on a persistent storage disc, it is important to provide a certain degree of security via password protection, the CM II does not fail in this regard. The managed account utility also allows you to give different users access to the data, by an administration utility of profiles and passwords. However you are not able to audit usage via user logs of copied or deleted data. If there is a way to do this then you most certainly would not be able to view the logs on the low resolution LCD screen. It is an interface you would more likely see on an old HP Laser printer rather than the graphic intensive configuration panels on the latest Xerox machines.
The Octave CM II and its different varieties with more or less bays (1-11 drives in addition to the Master drive) would be good for an up and coming artist wanting to distribute batches of their work or for distributing promotional documents or software. Enhancing the user interface is a must if the CM II wants to be part be part of the 21st century. Burning labels on the face of the discs would also remove the need for another device. These features are a necessity in justifying the redundantly large size of the case, as it is deeper than most tower PC cases. I was also quite disappointed at the lack of a user manual. Like most tech geeks, I prefer to figure out gadgets myself through an intuitive design but I would at least expect a copy of the manual available on Octave’s product website. The frustrations of a technophile do not alter the fact that the CM II performs its core competencies extremely well and effectively and this reliability factor will give it a strong argument for its industrial use as well.
