Associating a CD-Burner with MSI, the motherboard and video card manufacture may not be the first thing we think of, but the link is there. Plus it also makes sense if you consider that with every motherboard that gets sold, someone will invariably need a CDROM, or in this case a 40X CD-R, 12x CD-RW and 48x CD-ROM CD-RW drive.

Hopefully we will see the same quality and attention to detail that have made MSI motherboards and Video cards worthwhile investments.

MSI 8340 CDRW
	Ships with the following: User's Guide Ahead Nero 5.5 Software Audio jumper cable (4-pin connector) Philips mounting screws 40-pin IDE CABLE Manufacturer: www.msi.com

Buffer underrun protection is taking on many different names, and this is all getting rather confusing. MSI call it ExacLink, and the MSI 8340 has a 2MB buffer designed to prevent the burner from spitting out coasters because you decided to open a web browser or word file. This is a good thing, as any CDRW drive which doesn't offer buffer underrun protection in this day and age is not worth the money.

The MSI8340 features a standard rear end with power, IDE, jumpers, analog and digital audio out connectors. The front of the drive has a play pause button, stop eject button, a volume wheel, and jack for a set of headphones. The drive lists several noise reducing features and from what we were hearing they worked pretty well. The tray mechanism was also fairly smooth, and quiet.

Max data read speeds are 7200Kb/s, and max data write speeds are 6000KB/s for CDR, and 1800KB/s for CDRW discs. The MSI 8340 supports the usually assortment of writing modes, including; Disc-at-once, track-at-once, multisession, packet writing and the always popular raw writing. Personally, I just like the fact that drive came bundled with a nice version 5.5 of Ahead Nero. The 2MB of onboard buffer seems low when we consider other drives come equipped with 8MB, but didn't experience any problems during our burn testing so it's hard to make a call on that one.

The drive supports 8cm and 12cm discs in the vertical or horizontal position (oh so important for servers and some of those fancy cases) and is otherwise typically equipped. Now lets have a look at some of the data tests.